Nowadays, with so many Internet sites devoted to astrology—and paranormal TV programs which stress entertainment over authenticity—the landscape of intuitive personal consultation has changed. A person genuinely seeking help may have a difficult time telling the difference between really good readers and those with good marketing ploys. I suspect that many seekers become so distraught over the matter as to do nothing at all.
Here is a list for your reference that describes some characteristics of great astrologers. An astrologer does not need to meet all of these, but the more, the better.
1. They will not pressure you to do anything.
This is the opposite of the hard sell that I describe in detail in the bad astrologers article. Many astrologers sell items or services stemming from their astrological readings; I do this myself with my offer of spiritual work appropriate to that person's situation. However, I do not recommend this for all or even most clients, and I think this is where one needs to be very careful. A good astrologer will not push their products or additional services on you -- the less this is done on a case-by-case basis, the more questionable the motives of the astrologers are.
Many astrologers will recommend certain products or services that they do, and you have to use your intuition on this, but if you get the sense that this is something that they recommend to everyone, regardless of their individual needs, this does not bode well. Also, a good astrologer will not seek you out, but rather wait for you to come to them. The good ones have an excellent reputation and they do not need to chase ambulances.
2. They will give you concrete predictions and advice.
There isn't much more to say about this, other than you need to find an astrologer who is secure enough in themselves to be willing to be wrong. We are all wrong some of the time; otherwise, we would be God. A good astrologer will tell you what will happen and when it will happen. If they are right 80% of the time, stick by them, track them down wherever they may move, and whatever you do, do not let them go.
3. They will challenge your perception of reality.
This is the opposite of the Dr. Feel-Good approach detailed on the bad astrologers page. This does not mean that your astrologer will put you down, in fact; they should make you feel at ease. However, they will call you on your pretensions and illusions, and will give you a new perspective on reality that will help you grow as a person.
4. They will not use lots of fancy vocabulary.
They will not use lots of fancy vocabulary, astrological or otherwise, to confuse or impress you.
5. They will not judge you.
They will not judge you, no matter what bad things you may have done. This is not the same as flattering you, but you will get the feeling that it's okay to tell them about your failings. And this is as it should be.
6. They will be competent.
They will be competent, give you accurate and specific answers, and will be willing to explain their reasoning if you ask. They will own up to their mistakes.
7. They will not tell you the fact that they may have lots of important, famous, or rich clients.
The very best astrologers may have such a clientele, but they will never divulge this, and they will not look down on you even if the rest of their clients are VIPs. On the other hand, astrologers who are known for catering to the stars, or frequently allude to the high social standing of their clients, are highly suspect.
8. They will not pretend they use psychic or other non-astrological methods during the reading.
Astrology is one thing and psychism is another, and anyone who claims to mix these is of highly questionable repute.
9. They will give away quality things for free.
Sometimes bad astrologers use this technique to reel in unsuspecting clients, as you can read in the hard-sell section of the bad astrologers article. The main difference is that good astrologers give away things much more freely and things that are of much higher quality than do the bad astrologers. It is difficult for astrologers to live purely on donations, because unfortunately many people take advantage of them and pay little for highly valuable services. However, good astrologers recognize that their knowledge is a gift from above and therefore may not be hoarded for massive profits or social status.
10. You have to find them of your own accord.
This is a continuation of the points I make in #1 above. Heavy, in-your-face advertising is inversely proportional to the quality of the guidance you can expect to receive. From a financial point of view, bad astrologers will often be more expensive because your fees have to support their marketing campaigns. Good astrologers will be known in the community, so you should ask around and get references.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Astrology Lesson #2 - Houses
Using 2-D motion graphics, astrologer Jon Stevens offers an easy-to-understand primer on houses, i.e., what they are and how they add meaning to the astrological chart.
The Planetary Archetypes in Astrology
Each planet, including the Sun and Moon, is empirically associated with a planetary archetype of the same name. The entries below provide some of the various meanings and themes associated with each planetary archetype.
Sun
Moon
Mercury
Venus
Mars
Jupiter
Saturn
Uranus
Neptune
Pluto
Sun
Te central principle of vital creative energy, the will to exist; the impulse and capacity to be, to manifest, to be active, to be central, to radiate, to 'shine'; to rise above, achieve, illuminate, and integrate; the individual will and personal identity, the seat of mind and spirit, the animus, the executive functions of the self or ego, the capacity for initiative and purposeful assertion, the drive for individual autonomy and independence; directed and focused consciousness and self-awareness, the centrifugal expression of the self, the trajectory of self-manifestation, ascent and descent; the ruler of the day sky, of the clearly visible, the single source of luminosity that overcomes the encompassing darkness, the monocentric; yang; the part that contains the whole in potentia; Sol and all solar deities, the archetypal Hero in its many forms (Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche, 89-90).
Moon
The matrix of being, the psychosomatic foundation of the self, the womb and ground of life; the body and the soul, that which senses and intuits, the feeling nature; the impulse and capacity to gestate and bring forth, to receive and reflect, to relate and respond, to need and to care, to nurture and be nurtured, the condition of dependence and interdependence; the diffusely conscious and the unconscious, the anima, the immanent, the centripetal, the home, the fertile source and ground; the cycle of manifestation, the waxing and waning, the eternal round; the ruler of the night sky, of the diffusely visible and the invisible, multiple sources of luminosity within the encompassing darkness, the polycentric; yin; the whole that contains the part in potentia; Luna and all lunar deities, the Great Mother Goddess, together with aspects of the Child (puella, puer), constituting the relational matrix of life (Cosmos and Psyche, 90).
Mercury
The principle of mind, thought, communication, that which articulates the primary creative energy and renders it intelligible; the impulse and capacity to think, to conceptualize, to connect and mediate, to use words and language, to give and receive information; to make sense of, to grasp, to perceive and reason, understand and articulate; to transport, translate, transmit; the principle of Logos; Hermes, the messenger of the gods (Cosmos and Psyche, 90).
Venus
The principle of desire, love, beauty, value; the impulse and capacity to attract and be attracted, to love and be loved, to seek and create beauty and harmony, to engage in social and romantic relations, sensuous pleasure, artistic and aesthetic experience; the principle of Eros and the Beautiful; Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty (Cosmos and Psyche, 90).
Mars
The principle of energetic force; the impulse and capacity to assert, to act and move energetically and forcefully, to have an impact, to press forward and against, to defend and offend, to act with sharpness and ardor; the tendency to experience aggressiveness, anger, conflict, harm, violence, forceful physical energy; to be combative, competitive, courageous, vigorous; Ares, the god of war (Cosmos and Psyche, 90).
Jupiter
The principle of expansion, magnitude, growth, elevation, superiority; the capacity and impulse to enlarge and grow, to ascend and progress, to improve and magnify, to incorporate that which is external, to make greater wholes, to inflate; to experience success, honor, advancement, plenitude, abundance, prodigality, excess, surfeit; the capacity or inclination for magnanimity, optimism, enthusiasm, exuberance, joy, joviality, liberality, breadth of experience, philosophical and cultural aspiration, comprehensiveness and largeness of vision, pride, arrogance, aggrandizement, extravagance; fecundity, fortune, and providence; Zeus, the king of the Olympian gods (Cosmos and Psyche, 90-91).
Saturn
The principle of limit, structure, contraction, constraint, necessity, hard materiality, concrete manifestation; time, the past, tradition, age, maturity, mortality, the endings of things; gravity and gravitas, weightiness, that which burdens, binds, challenges, fortifies, deepens; the tendency to confine and constrict, to separate, to divide and define, to cut and shorten, to negate and oppose, to strengthen and forge through tension and resistance, to rigidify, to repress, to maintain a conservative and strict authority; to experience difficulty, decline, deprivation, defect and deficit, defeat, failure, loss, alienation; the labor of existence, suffering, old age, death; the weight of the past, the workings of fate, character, karma, the consequences of past action, error and guilt, punishment, retribution, imprisonment, the sense of 'no exit'; pessimism, inferiority, inhibition, isolation, oppression and depression; the impulse and capacity for discipline and duty, order, solitude, concentration, conciseness, thoroughness and precision, discrimination and objectivity, restraint and patience, endurance, responsibility, seriousness, authority, wisdom; the harvest of time, effort, and experience; the concern with consensus reality, factual concreteness, conventional forms and structures, foundations, boundaries, solidity and stability, security and control, rational organization, efficiency, law, right and wrong, judgment, the superego; the dark, cold, heavy, dense, dry, old, slow, distant; the senex, Kronos, the stern father of the gods (Cosmos and Psyche, 91).
Uranus
The planet Uranus is empirically associated with the principle of change, rebellion, freedom, liberation, reform and revolution, and the unexpected breakup of structures; with sudden surprises, revelations and awakenings, lightning-like flashes of insight, the acceleration of thoughts and events; with births and new beginnings of all kinds; and with intellectual brilliance, cultural innovation, technological invention, experiment, creativity, and originality. In addition to the occurrence of sudden breakthroughs and liberating events, Uranus transits are linked to unpredictable and disruptive changes; hence the planet is often referred to as the "cosmic trickster." Another set of themes associated with Uranus is a concern with the celestial and the cosmic, with astronomy and astrology, with science and esoteric knowledge, and with space travel and aviation. With respect to personal character, Uranus is regarded as signifying the rebel and the innovator, the awakener, the individualist, the dissident, the eccentric, the restless and wayward (Cosmos and Psyche, 93). Many essential attributes of the Uranus archetypal principle are conveyed by the mythic figure of Prometheus.
Many of these associations are empirically related to important phenomena surrounding the Discovery of Uranus.
Neptune
Neptune is associated with the transcendent, spiritual, ideal, symbolic, and imaginative dimensions of life; with the subtle, formless, intangible, and invisible; with the unitive, timeless, immaterial, and infinite; with all that which transcends the limited literal temporal and material world of concretely empirical reality: myth and religion, art and inspiration, ideals and aspirations, images and reflections, symbols and metaphors, dreams and visions, mysticism, religious devotion, universal compassion. It is associated with the impulse to surrender separative existence and egoic control, to dissolve boundaries and structures in favor of underlying unities and undifferentiated wholes, merging that which was separate, healing and wholeness; the dissolution of ego boundaries and reality structures, states of psychological fusion and intimations of intrauterine existence, melted ecstasy, mystical union, and primary narcissism; with tendencies towards illusion and delusion, deception and self-deception, escapism, intoxication, psychosis, perceptual and cognitive distortions, conflation and confusion, projection, fantasy; with the bedazzlement of consciousness whether by gods, archetypes, beliefs, dreams, ideals, or ideologies; with enchantment, in both positive and negative senses.
The archetypal principle linked to Neptune governs all nonordinary states of consciousness, as well as the stream of consciousness and the oceanic depths of the unconscious. Characteristic metaphors for its domain include the infinite sea of the imagination, the ocean of divine consciousness, and the archetypal wellspring of life. It is, in a sense, the archetype of the archetypal dimension itself, the anima mundi, the Gnostic pleroma, the Platonic realm of transcendent Ideas, the domain of the gods, the Immortals. In mythic and religious terms, it is associated with the all-encompassing womb of the Goddess, and with all deities of mystical union, universal love, and transcendent beauty; the mystical Christ, the all-compassionate Buddha, the Atman-Brahman union, the union of Shiva and Shakti, the hieros gamos or sacred marriage, the coniunctio oppositorum; the dreaming Vishnu, maya and lila, the self-reflecting Narcissus, the divine absorbed in its own reflection; Orpheus, god of artistic inspiration, the Muses; the cosmic Sophia whose spiritual beauty and wisdom pervade all.
Considered as a whole, these themes, qualities, and figures suggest that the name Neptune is both apt and inadequate in denoting a mythological figure embodying the planet's corresponding archetypal principle. On the one hand, central to the observed characteristics is an underlying symbolic association with water, the sea, the ocean, streams and rivers, mists and fogs, liquidity and dissolution, the amniotic and prenatal, the permeable and undifferentiated. In this regard, one thinks of the many oceanic and watery metaphors used to describe mystical experience, the all-encompassing ocean of divine consciousness of which our individual selves are but momentarily separate drops, the ceaselessly flowing all-informing Tao whose waterlike fluidity evades all definition, the primordial participation mystique of undifferentiated awareness, the mists of prehistory, the amniotic fetal and infantile states of primary fusion, the oceanic realms of the imagination, the fluid nature of psychic life generally: the flow and stream of consciousness, the influx of inspiration, the fog of confusion, drowning in the treacherous deep waters of the unconscious psyche, slipping into madness or addiction, surrendering to the flow of experience, dissolving into the divine union, the cleansing waters of purity and healing, melted ecstasy, and so forth. One thinks here, too, of Freud's reference to the "oceanic feeling": "a sensation of 'eternity,' a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded— as it were, 'oceanic'. . . it is the feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole." Equally relevant is William James's image of a transcendental "mother-sea" of consciousness with which the individual consciousness is continuous and of which the brain essentially serves as a sieve or filtering conduit (Cosmos and Psyche, 96-97).
Many of these associations are empirically related to important phenomena surrounding the Discovery of Neptune.
Pluto
To summarize the consensus of contemporary astrologers: Pluto is associated with the principle of elemental power, depth, and intensity; with that which compels, empowers, and intensifies whatever it touches, sometimes to overwhelming and catastrophic extremes; with the primordial instincts, libidinal and aggressive, destructive and regenerative, volcanic and cathartic, eliminative, transformative, ever-evolving; with the biological processes of birth, sex, and death, the cycle of death and rebirth; with upheaval, breakdown, decay, and fertilization; violent purgatorial discharge of pent-up energies, purifying fire; situations of life-and-death extremes, power struggles, all that is titanic, potent, and massive. Pluto represents the underworld and underground in all senses: elemental, geological, instinctual, political, social, sexual, urban, criminal, mythological, demonic. It is the dark, mysterious, taboo, and often terrifying reality that lurks beneath the surface of things, beneath the ego, societal conventions, and the veneer of civilization, beneath the surface of the Earth, that is periodically unleashed with destructive and transformative force. Pluto impels, burns, consumes, transfigures, resurrects. In mythic and religious terms, it is associated with all myths of descent and transformation, and with all deities of destruction and regeneration, death and rebirth: Dionysus, Hades and Persephone, Pan, Medusa, Lilith, Innana, Isis and Osiris, the volcano goddess Pele, Quetzalcoatl, the Serpent power, Kundalini, Shiva, Kali, Shakti.
Closely analogous to Freud's concept of the primordial id, "the broiling cauldron of the instincts," and to Darwin's understanding of an ever-evolving nature and the biological struggle for existence, the archetype associated with the planet Pluto is also linked to Nietzsche's Dionysian principle and the will to power and to Schopenhauer's blind striving universal will—all these embodying the powerful forces of nature and emerging from nature's chthonic depths, within and without, the intense, fiery elemental underworld (Cosmos and Psyche, 99).
Many of these associations are empirically related to important phenomena surrounding the Discovery of Pluto.
Sun
Moon
Mercury
Venus
Mars
Jupiter
Saturn
Uranus
Neptune
Pluto
Sun
Te central principle of vital creative energy, the will to exist; the impulse and capacity to be, to manifest, to be active, to be central, to radiate, to 'shine'; to rise above, achieve, illuminate, and integrate; the individual will and personal identity, the seat of mind and spirit, the animus, the executive functions of the self or ego, the capacity for initiative and purposeful assertion, the drive for individual autonomy and independence; directed and focused consciousness and self-awareness, the centrifugal expression of the self, the trajectory of self-manifestation, ascent and descent; the ruler of the day sky, of the clearly visible, the single source of luminosity that overcomes the encompassing darkness, the monocentric; yang; the part that contains the whole in potentia; Sol and all solar deities, the archetypal Hero in its many forms (Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche, 89-90).
Moon
The matrix of being, the psychosomatic foundation of the self, the womb and ground of life; the body and the soul, that which senses and intuits, the feeling nature; the impulse and capacity to gestate and bring forth, to receive and reflect, to relate and respond, to need and to care, to nurture and be nurtured, the condition of dependence and interdependence; the diffusely conscious and the unconscious, the anima, the immanent, the centripetal, the home, the fertile source and ground; the cycle of manifestation, the waxing and waning, the eternal round; the ruler of the night sky, of the diffusely visible and the invisible, multiple sources of luminosity within the encompassing darkness, the polycentric; yin; the whole that contains the part in potentia; Luna and all lunar deities, the Great Mother Goddess, together with aspects of the Child (puella, puer), constituting the relational matrix of life (Cosmos and Psyche, 90).
Mercury
The principle of mind, thought, communication, that which articulates the primary creative energy and renders it intelligible; the impulse and capacity to think, to conceptualize, to connect and mediate, to use words and language, to give and receive information; to make sense of, to grasp, to perceive and reason, understand and articulate; to transport, translate, transmit; the principle of Logos; Hermes, the messenger of the gods (Cosmos and Psyche, 90).
Venus
The principle of desire, love, beauty, value; the impulse and capacity to attract and be attracted, to love and be loved, to seek and create beauty and harmony, to engage in social and romantic relations, sensuous pleasure, artistic and aesthetic experience; the principle of Eros and the Beautiful; Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty (Cosmos and Psyche, 90).
Mars
The principle of energetic force; the impulse and capacity to assert, to act and move energetically and forcefully, to have an impact, to press forward and against, to defend and offend, to act with sharpness and ardor; the tendency to experience aggressiveness, anger, conflict, harm, violence, forceful physical energy; to be combative, competitive, courageous, vigorous; Ares, the god of war (Cosmos and Psyche, 90).
Jupiter
The principle of expansion, magnitude, growth, elevation, superiority; the capacity and impulse to enlarge and grow, to ascend and progress, to improve and magnify, to incorporate that which is external, to make greater wholes, to inflate; to experience success, honor, advancement, plenitude, abundance, prodigality, excess, surfeit; the capacity or inclination for magnanimity, optimism, enthusiasm, exuberance, joy, joviality, liberality, breadth of experience, philosophical and cultural aspiration, comprehensiveness and largeness of vision, pride, arrogance, aggrandizement, extravagance; fecundity, fortune, and providence; Zeus, the king of the Olympian gods (Cosmos and Psyche, 90-91).
Saturn
The principle of limit, structure, contraction, constraint, necessity, hard materiality, concrete manifestation; time, the past, tradition, age, maturity, mortality, the endings of things; gravity and gravitas, weightiness, that which burdens, binds, challenges, fortifies, deepens; the tendency to confine and constrict, to separate, to divide and define, to cut and shorten, to negate and oppose, to strengthen and forge through tension and resistance, to rigidify, to repress, to maintain a conservative and strict authority; to experience difficulty, decline, deprivation, defect and deficit, defeat, failure, loss, alienation; the labor of existence, suffering, old age, death; the weight of the past, the workings of fate, character, karma, the consequences of past action, error and guilt, punishment, retribution, imprisonment, the sense of 'no exit'; pessimism, inferiority, inhibition, isolation, oppression and depression; the impulse and capacity for discipline and duty, order, solitude, concentration, conciseness, thoroughness and precision, discrimination and objectivity, restraint and patience, endurance, responsibility, seriousness, authority, wisdom; the harvest of time, effort, and experience; the concern with consensus reality, factual concreteness, conventional forms and structures, foundations, boundaries, solidity and stability, security and control, rational organization, efficiency, law, right and wrong, judgment, the superego; the dark, cold, heavy, dense, dry, old, slow, distant; the senex, Kronos, the stern father of the gods (Cosmos and Psyche, 91).
Uranus
The planet Uranus is empirically associated with the principle of change, rebellion, freedom, liberation, reform and revolution, and the unexpected breakup of structures; with sudden surprises, revelations and awakenings, lightning-like flashes of insight, the acceleration of thoughts and events; with births and new beginnings of all kinds; and with intellectual brilliance, cultural innovation, technological invention, experiment, creativity, and originality. In addition to the occurrence of sudden breakthroughs and liberating events, Uranus transits are linked to unpredictable and disruptive changes; hence the planet is often referred to as the "cosmic trickster." Another set of themes associated with Uranus is a concern with the celestial and the cosmic, with astronomy and astrology, with science and esoteric knowledge, and with space travel and aviation. With respect to personal character, Uranus is regarded as signifying the rebel and the innovator, the awakener, the individualist, the dissident, the eccentric, the restless and wayward (Cosmos and Psyche, 93). Many essential attributes of the Uranus archetypal principle are conveyed by the mythic figure of Prometheus.
Many of these associations are empirically related to important phenomena surrounding the Discovery of Uranus.
Neptune
Neptune is associated with the transcendent, spiritual, ideal, symbolic, and imaginative dimensions of life; with the subtle, formless, intangible, and invisible; with the unitive, timeless, immaterial, and infinite; with all that which transcends the limited literal temporal and material world of concretely empirical reality: myth and religion, art and inspiration, ideals and aspirations, images and reflections, symbols and metaphors, dreams and visions, mysticism, religious devotion, universal compassion. It is associated with the impulse to surrender separative existence and egoic control, to dissolve boundaries and structures in favor of underlying unities and undifferentiated wholes, merging that which was separate, healing and wholeness; the dissolution of ego boundaries and reality structures, states of psychological fusion and intimations of intrauterine existence, melted ecstasy, mystical union, and primary narcissism; with tendencies towards illusion and delusion, deception and self-deception, escapism, intoxication, psychosis, perceptual and cognitive distortions, conflation and confusion, projection, fantasy; with the bedazzlement of consciousness whether by gods, archetypes, beliefs, dreams, ideals, or ideologies; with enchantment, in both positive and negative senses.
The archetypal principle linked to Neptune governs all nonordinary states of consciousness, as well as the stream of consciousness and the oceanic depths of the unconscious. Characteristic metaphors for its domain include the infinite sea of the imagination, the ocean of divine consciousness, and the archetypal wellspring of life. It is, in a sense, the archetype of the archetypal dimension itself, the anima mundi, the Gnostic pleroma, the Platonic realm of transcendent Ideas, the domain of the gods, the Immortals. In mythic and religious terms, it is associated with the all-encompassing womb of the Goddess, and with all deities of mystical union, universal love, and transcendent beauty; the mystical Christ, the all-compassionate Buddha, the Atman-Brahman union, the union of Shiva and Shakti, the hieros gamos or sacred marriage, the coniunctio oppositorum; the dreaming Vishnu, maya and lila, the self-reflecting Narcissus, the divine absorbed in its own reflection; Orpheus, god of artistic inspiration, the Muses; the cosmic Sophia whose spiritual beauty and wisdom pervade all.
Considered as a whole, these themes, qualities, and figures suggest that the name Neptune is both apt and inadequate in denoting a mythological figure embodying the planet's corresponding archetypal principle. On the one hand, central to the observed characteristics is an underlying symbolic association with water, the sea, the ocean, streams and rivers, mists and fogs, liquidity and dissolution, the amniotic and prenatal, the permeable and undifferentiated. In this regard, one thinks of the many oceanic and watery metaphors used to describe mystical experience, the all-encompassing ocean of divine consciousness of which our individual selves are but momentarily separate drops, the ceaselessly flowing all-informing Tao whose waterlike fluidity evades all definition, the primordial participation mystique of undifferentiated awareness, the mists of prehistory, the amniotic fetal and infantile states of primary fusion, the oceanic realms of the imagination, the fluid nature of psychic life generally: the flow and stream of consciousness, the influx of inspiration, the fog of confusion, drowning in the treacherous deep waters of the unconscious psyche, slipping into madness or addiction, surrendering to the flow of experience, dissolving into the divine union, the cleansing waters of purity and healing, melted ecstasy, and so forth. One thinks here, too, of Freud's reference to the "oceanic feeling": "a sensation of 'eternity,' a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded— as it were, 'oceanic'. . . it is the feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole." Equally relevant is William James's image of a transcendental "mother-sea" of consciousness with which the individual consciousness is continuous and of which the brain essentially serves as a sieve or filtering conduit (Cosmos and Psyche, 96-97).
Many of these associations are empirically related to important phenomena surrounding the Discovery of Neptune.
Pluto
To summarize the consensus of contemporary astrologers: Pluto is associated with the principle of elemental power, depth, and intensity; with that which compels, empowers, and intensifies whatever it touches, sometimes to overwhelming and catastrophic extremes; with the primordial instincts, libidinal and aggressive, destructive and regenerative, volcanic and cathartic, eliminative, transformative, ever-evolving; with the biological processes of birth, sex, and death, the cycle of death and rebirth; with upheaval, breakdown, decay, and fertilization; violent purgatorial discharge of pent-up energies, purifying fire; situations of life-and-death extremes, power struggles, all that is titanic, potent, and massive. Pluto represents the underworld and underground in all senses: elemental, geological, instinctual, political, social, sexual, urban, criminal, mythological, demonic. It is the dark, mysterious, taboo, and often terrifying reality that lurks beneath the surface of things, beneath the ego, societal conventions, and the veneer of civilization, beneath the surface of the Earth, that is periodically unleashed with destructive and transformative force. Pluto impels, burns, consumes, transfigures, resurrects. In mythic and religious terms, it is associated with all myths of descent and transformation, and with all deities of destruction and regeneration, death and rebirth: Dionysus, Hades and Persephone, Pan, Medusa, Lilith, Innana, Isis and Osiris, the volcano goddess Pele, Quetzalcoatl, the Serpent power, Kundalini, Shiva, Kali, Shakti.
Closely analogous to Freud's concept of the primordial id, "the broiling cauldron of the instincts," and to Darwin's understanding of an ever-evolving nature and the biological struggle for existence, the archetype associated with the planet Pluto is also linked to Nietzsche's Dionysian principle and the will to power and to Schopenhauer's blind striving universal will—all these embodying the powerful forces of nature and emerging from nature's chthonic depths, within and without, the intense, fiery elemental underworld (Cosmos and Psyche, 99).
Many of these associations are empirically related to important phenomena surrounding the Discovery of Pluto.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Free Astrology Software
Here's a cute little program called StarLove that calculates the compatibility between two charts. To download it, click here.
Get the New free StarLite natal chart program Download StarLite Free.
Free Astrology Software from Allen Edwall Download Allen's Freeware
Get the New free StarLite natal chart program Download StarLite Free.
Free Astrology Software from Allen Edwall Download Allen's Freeware
Important Astrological Terms
Chart Angles
◦Ascendant
◦Descendant
◦Midheaven or Medium Coeli (MC)
◦Imum Coeli (IC)
•Direct Motion
•Retrograde Motion
•Stations and Stationary Planets
•Planetary Orbital Periods
•Inner Planets
•Outer Planets
•Zodiac
•Tropical and Sidereal Zodiacs
•Ecliptic
•Signs
•Houses
•Saturn Return
•Saturn Cycle
•Synastry
Chart Angles
Astrological charts are demarcated by four primary angles, which provide important symbolic reference points for geographic, spatial, existential, and psychological orientation. The four primary angles are:
•Ascendant
•Descendant
•Midheaven or Medium Coeli (MC)
•Imum Coeli (IC)
Note: The archetypal meanings and psychological functions of the four angles in the birth chart are a complex issue requiring more exploration than is possible in the following brief definitions. More detail concerning the four angles will be provided here at some future date.
Ascendant
The ascendant is the chart angle found on the left side of the chart that forms a horizontal axis with the descendant. The ascendant is located at the precise degree of the sign that was rising on the eastern horizon at the place and moment for which the astrological birth chart was calculated. In traditional natal astrology, the ascendant is typically associated with the persona, modes of self-expression, how one appears to others, and one's approach to life.
Descendant
The descendant is the angle found on the right side of the chart that forms a horizontal axis with the ascendant. The descendant is located at the precise degree of the sign that was setting on the eastern horizon at the place and moment for which an astrological chart was calculated. In traditional natal astrology, the descendant is typically associated with partnerships and one-to-one relationships, how the individual is met and seen by others, and how individuals understand themselves through their interactions with others in close relationships.
Midheaven or Medium Coeli (MC)
The midheaven is the angle found at the top of a birth chart that forms the vertical axis with the imum coeli through the chart center. The midheaven is located at the most elevated degree of the zodiac at the place and moment for which an astrological chart was calculated. For example, the Sun is located at the midheaven at noon (standard time). In traditional natal astrology, the midheaven is typically associated with such things as career, vocation, accomplishment, conscious aspirations, collective responsibilities, and one's public reputation. The Latin term medium coeli means "middle of the heavens."
Imum Coeli (IC)
The imum coeli is the angle at the bottom of the birth chart that forms the vertical axis with the midheaven through the chart center. As the point exactly opposite the midheaven, the IC indicates the lowest point on the zodiac at the place and moment for which an astrological chart was calculated. For example, the Sun would be found at the IC at midnight (standard time). In natal astrology, the IC is traditionally associated with origins, roots, the past, the family, the home, the private inner world, and the source of one's being. The Latin term imum coeli means "lowest part of the heavens."
Direct Motion
The term direct motion refers to the apparent motion of a planet along the zodiac or ecliptic in its normal direction, proceeding from west to east in accord with the planet's actual motion on its orbit. Direct Motion is the opposite of Retrograde Motion.
Retrograde Motion
The term retrograde motion refers to the apparent motion of a planet along the zodiac or ecliptic in the reverse direction (proceeding from east to west) from its direct or actual orbital direction (from west to east). Such apparent reversal of direction results from the orbital progress of the Earth and the planet relative to the Sun. Planets displaying retrograde motion are said to be retrograde, as in Mercury retrograde. The Sun and Moon do not display retrograde motion. Retrograde Motion is the opposite of Direct Motion.
Stations and Stationary Planets
In their apparent movements, all planets (but not the Sun and Moon) exhibit both direct and retrograde motions. When their apparent motion changes direction from direct to retrograde, or the reverse, the planet appears to stop for a period of time before beginning to move in the opposite direction. That position and period of time during which the planet appears not to move is referred to as a station. Planets in direct motion that station to become retrograde are referred to as stationary retrograde. Planets in retrograde motion that station to transition to direct motion are referred to as stationary direct. Because the Sun and Moon do not exhibit retrograde motion, they also do not station.
Planetary Orbital Periods
From the Earth's perspective, the Sun, Moon, and each of the eight planets takes a different amount of time to move completely around the zodiac, resulting from each body's different orbital period. Here are the approximate orbital periods of each of the ten astrological planets:
Moon 27.3 days (around the Earth)
Sun 1 year (resulting from the Earth's orbit around the Sun)
Mercury 0.24 years (88 days)
Venus 0.62 years (224 days)
Mars 1.88 years (686 days)
Jupiter 11.86 years
Saturn 29.5 years
Uranus 84 years
Neptune 165 years
Pluto 248 years
Note: The Sun, of course, does not orbit around another object in the solar system, but from the Earth's perspective it appears to travel completely around the zodiac once each year. Likewise, although the Moon orbits the Earth, it appears to travel completely around the zodiac every lunar month. Because the orbits of Mercury and Venus are closer to the Sun than that of the Earth, both planets take approximately one year to complete their journey around the zodiac, doing so in somewhat close proximity to the Sun's journey. During that approximately one-year period, Mercury completes more than three orbits around the Sun while Venus completes one and two-thirds orbits.
Inner Planets
In astrology, the five inner planets are those whose orbits are inside Jupiter's orbit:
•Sun
•Moon
•Mercury
•Venus
•Mars
back to top »Outer Planets
In astrology, the five outer planets include Jupiter and all planets whose orbits are outside Jupiter's orbit:
•Jupiter
•Saturn
•Uranus
•Neptune
•Pluto
Zodiac
A circular zone or band projected onto the sky that is centered upon the ecliptic, or the plane created by the apparent annual motion of the Sun. From its early origins in Mesopotamian celestial divination, one of the primary functions of the zodiac has been as a celestial coordinate system for tracking current and predicting future positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets from the perspective of the Earth. For this purpose, the 360-degree zodiac circle is divided into twelve equal divisions or signs of 30 degrees each: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Aquarius, and Pisces. See Signs.
Tropical and Sidereal Zodiacs
As the principal function of the Zodiac is to assist in mapping the movements of solar system objects, the zodiac is a coordinate system that is divided into twelve equal parts, known as signs. As there is no inherent beginning to a circle, theoretically there are an infinite number of starting points for the zodiac. In actual practice, however, there are two major zodiac systems in use, each with its own beginning position. The starting point of the sidereal zodiac, which forms the basis of Vedic astrology, is the first degree of the constellation Aries. In contrast, the tropical zodiac, which is the preferred system of Western astrology, uses the vernal equinox as its beginning point. Another major difference between the two zodiacs may be further elucidated by suggesting that the sidereal zodiac uses celestial phenomena for its orientation and system of interpretive meaning while the tropical zodiac relies upon seasonal variation for its system of organization and significance.
Ecliptic
This term refers to the apparent circular orbit of the Sun around the Earth during the course of a year, as seen from the standpoint of an observer on Earth. This perceived circular course results, of course, from the Earth's revolution around the Sun. Constellations seen along the ecliptic form the original basis for the twelve signs of the zodiac. On a two-dimensional plane, all the planets appear to occupy a position on the ecliptic regardless of their distance from the Earth. As they move along the ecliptic during their orbits, the planets appear to move around the zodiac, passing from one sign to the next.
Signs
The twelve astrological signs are equal divisions of the zodiac. Each sign comprises thirty degrees and is named after one of twelve constellations that are in close proximity to the ecliptic. Each sign is also associated with a specific set of fundamental qualities, which have been variously described as temperaments, personality traits, types of energy, or essences. In Western astrology, taken as a whole, the twelve signs of the zodiac are said to represent the full range of human experience. The twelve signs of the zodiac are:
•Aries
•Taurus
•Gemini
•Cancer
•Leo
•Virgo
•Libra
•Scorpio
•Sagittarius
•Capricorn
•Aquarius
•Pisces
Because Archai does not focus primarily on astrological signs, it is beyond the scope of this glossary to provide meaningful descriptions of each sign. Recommended resources for signs and their meanings include Robert Hand's Horoscope Symbols (Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 1981), Stephen Arroyo's Chart Interpretation Handbook: Guidelines for Understanding the Essentials of the Birth Chart (Sebastopol, CA: CRCS Publications, 1989), and John Jocelyn's Meditations on the Signs of the Zodiac (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1970).
Houses
The birth chart is composed of twelve divisions, known as houses, in which the positions of the planets and signs of the zodiac are represented relative to local time and space. While there are various house systems, each with its own way of mapping local space relative to the ecliptic, all house systems are predicated on the idea that each house is symbolically connected to specific areas of life or fields of experience, so that the first house is generally considered to be concerned with action and self-orientation, the fourth house with home and family, the seventh house with relationships, the tenth house with career, and so on. When a planet is located in a particular house, this implies that the archetypal principle associated with that planet will be expressed primarily in the areas of life or fields of experience associated with that house. Because archetypal astrology places more emphasis on the research of archetypal correlations with planetary aspects than on the significance of houses, a detailed explication of houses will not be provided here. Recommended sources include Robert Hand, Horoscope Symbols (Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 1981); Bill Herbst, Houses of the Horoscope, 2nd ed. (Woburn, MA: Serendipity Press, 2006), Dane Rudhyar, The Astrological Houses: The Spectrum of Individual Experience (Sebastopol, CA: CRCS Publications, 1972); and Howard Sasportas, The Twelve Houses: Understanding the Importance of the Houses in Your Astrological Birth Chart (London: Thorsons, 1998).
Saturn Return
The approximately three-year period when Saturn completes its 29-year cycle around the zodiac to return to its original position in the natal chart. The first Saturn Return occurs between the ages of 28 and 30 and the second between 57 and 60.
For more on the Saturn Return, see Saturn Cycle.
Saturn Cycle
(Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche, 119-125.)
Another planetary transit cycle in which distinctive archetypal correlations can be easily recognized in individual biographies is the Saturn cycle, approximately twenty-nine and a half years in length. All individuals go through the first Saturn return transit from about the age of twenty-eight through age thirty, a three-year period in the course of which a characteristic complex of biographical events and experiences seems to occur with remarkable consistency.1 During these years individuals tend to experience their lives as distinctly coming to the end of an era—bringing the years of youth to a close and initiating the person, in an often challenging way, into the principal period of mature activity in the world in engagement with the established social order.
In examining many hundreds of individual biographies, I observed that during the years from age twenty-eight to thirty, a tangibly different, usually more serious posture towards life, work, long-term goals, security, parents, tradition, and established social structures tended to emerge. At this time, the wider aspirations and wanderings of youth seemed to undergo a transformation, becoming focused on and grounded in concrete practicalities and particular commitments: vocational, relational, intellectual, psychological, spiritual. Significant relationships often came to an end, and others of enduring consequence began. Modes of being that had characterized the preceding years were now outgrown and decisively left behind as no longer appropriate, or ineluctably taken away by changing life circumstances. The consequences of past actions and events tended to emerge and require assimilation, and a growing tendency to engage in serious self-reflection and biographical retrospection was typical.
In coincidence with the Saturn return transit, the challenging realities of life and death, time and aging, loss and adversity, work and responsibility became dominant concerns in a distinctly different manner from how these same realities were experienced in one's teens or twenties. Equally characteristic during this three-year transit was a definite sense of existential compression or contraction, generally accompanied by obstacles, limitations, and frustrations of various kinds—financial, physical, relational—and often including a definite encounter with human mortality, finitude, and fallibility. For some, the years of this transit near age thirty marked a psychological transformation that brought an end to the more creative, adventurous, open-minded and free-spirited youthful self and the establishment of a more rigidly conservative, constrained, and risk-averse personality identified with the status quo and unquestioned conventional values. By contrast, many others seemed to resolve this archetypal transition through the strenuous forging of a synthesis of the aspiring, creative impulses of youth with the structuring, stabilizing, disciplining, foundation-building impulses of maturity.
In either case, the often noted, fairly easily recognizable difference between individuals who are over thirty from those younger than thirty seemed to be associated with the decisive emergence in just these years of personal qualities and life circumstances whose common qualities all seemed to be comprehensible in terms of the Saturn archetype being potently constellated at that time.2 The following description by Gertrude Stein, from her early work Fernhurst, well describes a characteristic form of the life transition that consistently coincides with the Saturn return period:
It happens often in the twenty-ninth year of life that all the forces that have been engaged through the years of childhood, adolescence and youth in confused and ferocious combat range themselves in ordered ranks—one is uncertain of one's aims, meaning and power during these years of tumultuous growth when aspiration has no relation to fulfillment and one plunges here and there with energy and misdirection during the storm and stress of the making of a personality until at last we reach the twenty-ninth year, the straight and narrow gateway of maturity and life which was all uproar and confusion narrows down to form and purpose and we exchange a great dim possibility for a small hard reality.
Also in our American life where there is no coercion in custom and it is our right to change our vocation so often as we have desire and opportunity, it is a common experience that our youth extends through the whole first twenty-nine years of our life and it is not until we reach thirty that we find at last that vocation for which we feel ourselves fit and to which we willingly devote continued labor.3
In researching hundreds of biographies to examine the nature of each individual's life trajectory, I regularly observed that the succeeding three decades—the person's thirties, forties, and fifties—could be seen in retrospect to have been decisively shaped by the structural transformations that took place during the first Saturn return transit between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty. One's first symphony is composed and first public concert takes place (Beethoven); one's major professional association is established (Shakespeare becomes a member of the Globe's company of players and their chief playwright); one's pivotal career appointment is received (Ficino as head of the Platonic Academy of Florence, Luther as teacher of biblical theology at Wittenberg, Kepler as Imperial Mathematician in Prague, Galileo as professor of mathematics in Padua, William James as lecturer in science at Harvard); one's first significant achievement occurs (Marie Curie discovers radium and polonium, Niels Bohr formulates his theory of atomic structure); one's first significant public recognition takes place (Newton is elected to the Royal Society, Georgia O'Keeffe has her first exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz's gallery, Duke Ellington begins his five-year engagement at the Cotton Club); one's first major public act takes place that defines one's subsequent career (Demosthenes's first major speech before the Athenian Assembly, Martin Luther King's participation and arrest in a protest against racial segregation in Atlanta).
Other biographical patterns with a comparable archetypal character were equally evident during these years of the Saturn return, age twenty-eight to thirty, as for example the tendency to take on a new level of personal responsibility and achieve a new degree of personal independence (Margaret Fuller becomes editor of the Transcendentalist journal The Dial; Abigail Adams, with her husband John away in public service for most of a decade, raises their family and runs household, farm, and business largely by herself from age twenty-nine, establishes her own independent sensibility and finds her own voice in writing her letters). Or one leaves the wanderings of youth to enter one's mature calling ("The irresponsible days of my youth are over," Tennessee Williams wrote of the moment, age twenty-nine, when he received a telegram in Mexico from the Theatre Guild that requested him to return to New York for his first Broadway production).4 One's first film is directed (Truffaut's The 400 Blows, Godard's Breathless, Fellini's Luci del Varietà , Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou); one's first mature work is produced (Kafka writes The Judgment and The Metamorphosis, F. Scott Fitzgerald writes The Great Gatsby, Camus writes The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger, Saul Bellow writes The Dangling Man, Allen Ginsberg writes Howl); one establishes one's public persona (Aurore Dupin employs the nom de plume George Sand and publishes her first novel Indiana, Samuel Clemens publishes his first literary work, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," under the nom de plume Mark Twain). Or one meets the mentor or model for one's subsequent development (Augustine meets Bishop Ambrose, Melville befriends Hawthorne, Freud studies with Charcot, Jung begins correspondence with Freud, Pablo Neruda encounters Federico Garcia Lorca). Or one moves to the location and cultural milieu in which one's life work will begin to unfold (Leonardo moves to Milan to work in the court of Duke Ludovico Sforza, Rousseau moves to Paris and meets Diderot and the encyclopedists, Gertrude Stein moves to Paris and establishes her salon at 27 rue de Fleurus).
The Saturn return transit generally coincided with what might be called a period of biographical crystallization, visible not only in external events such as those just cited but also in a certain solidifying of the individual's psychic constitution and establishing of the basic structure of the personality. William James believed that after age thirty a person's character was "set in plaster." Yet depending on the individual's specific response to the pressures and circumstances of these critical years, this maturation and solidification could actually entail a new level of personal autonomy and self-reliance that had been unattainable in the years just before, a new confidence grounded in self-knowledge and the sense of having found one's direction or purpose. Many factors seemed relevant for understanding the variability among the experiences of different individuals during this period, including differences in how the person led his or her life before the transit and differences between the birth charts of the individuals involved.
On occasion, the achievement of maturational independence and individuation seemed to inhibit or close down the sources of creativity that were previously accessible in youth, as if the spontaneous influx from a kind of creative wellspring could not survive the transition into maturity. With certain highly creative young artists, the crystallization of personality and maturational pressures of the Saturn return period resulted in an individuation that both climaxed and effectively ended the more freely experimental creativity of their twenties (a creativity that typically began during the Uranus square Uranus transit of the late teens and early twenties). A notable example of this pattern is the case of the four Beatles: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. After the period of brilliant group creativity sustained through their twenties, from 1962 to 1969, the four musicians decisively moved away from each other in the course of their Saturn return transits, preferring individual songwriting, bringing forth their first solo albums, and establishing marital relationships that precluded the close creative bond of the preceding years. The work the four men produced during their respective Saturn return periods between age twenty-eight and thirty, which began in 1968 and extended into the early 1970s, marked the climax of their creative lives, as embodied both in their extraordinary final albums as Beatles (the double White Album, Let It Be, Abbey Road) and in the first solo albums that each produced. After the age of thirty, their individual efforts seldom attained the creative brilliance of their youth, as if that particular form of creativity had flourished best as a kind of spontaneous collective influx through the group mind of the young Beatles, and ceased to thrive after the assimilation of the Saturn principle of maturity, separation, self-reliance, and serious engagement with the realities of the individual life associated with the period of the Saturn return.
I found that individual variations in the experiences during this period also closely corresponded with the other outer-planet transits that happened to coincide with the Saturn return, transits that varied from person to person according to their uniquely configured natal chart. (Only a transit of a planet to its own natal position happens to everyone at approximately the same time of life, as with the cycles of transiting Uranus to natal Uranus and of transiting Saturn to natal Saturn that we have been discussing.) The specific quality of the events and responses that occurred during an individual's Saturn return seemed to be affected by the distinctive character of the archetypal principles associated with these other coinciding planetary transits.
Such a case is vividly exemplified in the life of William James, whose Saturn return transit happened to coincide with the once-in-a-lifetime transit of Uranus opposite natal Sun, a transit that I observed consistently coincided with periods of sudden personal emancipation and creative breakthrough with a sense of self-awakening or self-liberation. When James was in his twenty-ninth year, he experienced a crisis of depression and anxiety that reached nearly suicidal intensity. This emotional crisis was closely linked with his sustained philosophical struggle with the nature of free will and determinism, both scientific and theological. He experienced this struggle at a personal level in the form of a general sense of oppressive existential constraint and moral impotence. One day while reading the work of the French philosopher Charles Renouvier on free will, James suddenly saw his way clear to a resolution of the crisis, deciding that "my first act of free will shall be to believe in free will." From this pivotal moment can be traced the subsequent unfolding of James's life and thought, with his distinctive lifelong philosophical commitment to human freedom, individual autonomy, creative unpredictability, and pragmatic flexibility in response to an indeterminate open universe.
Human freedom is . . . a special case of universal indeterminism. My future, though continuous with my past, is not determined by it. Just so the future of the world; although it grows out of the total past, it is not a mere result of that past. If I am creative—that is, if human freedom is effectual—then the world is creative, if for no other reason than that I am part of the world. What is constant in my behavior is the result of habits which never entirely lose their flexibility. In the same way the constancies charted by the laws of science are only more inveterate habits.5
James's case exemplifies a distinctive synthesis of the two different archetypal impulses at work in correlation with the two transits. On the one hand, we see the characteristic biographical tendencies of the Saturn return period: the occurrence of a personal crisis involving an encounter with mortality, a general sense of existential contraction and enforced maturational development, a life decision establishing an enduring personal commitment and philosophical perspective, the crystallization of lifelong character traits, and the occurrence of a pivotal development establishing the direction of one's career (his appointment as lecturer at Harvard). On the other hand, the outcome of this period also bore the distinctive archetypal character of the Promethean themes and qualities typical of a major Uranus transit to the natal Sun: the sudden personal emancipation from a constraining reality, a new and unexpected sense of freedom of the self, a newly awakened capacity for the active assertion of the individual will, the discovery of a path of self-expression liberating one's creativity, and a new experience of creative indeterminacy in the world itself.
I found that a similarly decisive threshold of transformation, with similar individual variability, consistently coincided with the second Saturn return transit one full Saturn cycle later. Taking place during a three-year period approximately between the ages of fifty-seven and sixty, the period of the second Saturn return was typically marked by some form of culmination, completion, or cyclical closure of the processes and structures that had been established during the first Saturn return three decades earlier, including one's work and career, significant relationships, and basic existential attitudes. Again, a deep encounter with the limits and mortal realities of human existence was typical (as expressed, for example, in Tolstoy's great novella The Death of Ivan Illich, written during his second Saturn return). An acute awareness that the end of life was now closer than its beginning characteristically intensified existential concerns about what one's life had accomplished, what values had been served, whether one's current commitments reflected the reality of the finite time remaining. The entire spectrum of motifs and tendencies associated with the Saturn archetype again seems to be constellated during this moment in life coincident with the completion of the planet Saturn's orbit: age, mortality, gravity of concern, self-judgment, duty, worldly status, work and value, endings of things, the passing of an era, a decisive maturational threshold.
The approach of the age of sixty generally seemed to mark a fundamental moment of biographical transformation with a quality suggestive of cyclical completion, life review, and structural reconfiguration in certain respects not unlike the first Saturn return. In this later period, however, the completion and reconfiguration was taking place after, at the other end of, the thirty-year cycle of adult activity and responsibility in the world. It mediated the transition into what in traditional societies would be called the status of elderhood, whether this transition connotes simply age and the consequences of time and life's labors or a notably new level of societal responsibility, well-earned respect, personal gravitas, or wisdom grounded in long experience. Often the character of this period suggested the theme of reaping what had been sown, for better or worse. A new stage of life was beginning, at once older and yet also, sometimes, lighter—as if a task has been completed, a burden lifted, an obligation discharged—a cycle of Saturn completed. Both Saturn return periods seemed to function as a kind of constricting birth canal that bodied forth the next stage of life.
Before and after these cyclical conjunction periods of the Saturn cycle near the ages of thirty and sixty is a further noteworthy pattern of correlations involving the ongoing sequence of quadrature alignments in the personal Saturn transit cycle after birth and after each conjunction—the square, the opposition, and the next square followed by the subsequent conjunction. These quadrature aspects occur in intervals approximately every seven to seven and a half years, and last for about a year each time. The first Saturn-square-Saturn transit takes place near the age of seven; the opposition transit takes place around age fourteen to fifteen; the next square sometime between twenty-one and twenty-three. After the first Saturn return at the age of twenty-eight to thirty, the cycle begins again, continuing in approximately seven-year intervals throughout life.
I found that these transits marked with an almost clocklike regularity periods of critical transformation, maturational crises, pivotal decisions, and biographical contractions and stresses of various kinds. Transformative encounters with authority, with limitations, with mortality, and with the consequences of past actions were highly characteristic. Different forms of separation from parental, familial, or social matrices often occurred, requiring a new level of existential self-reliance, inner authority, maturity and competence, individuation, concentration of energies, and consolidation of resources, and bringing a fundamental realignment of one's life and character. Distinct patterns were often visible connecting one Saturn quadrature alignment period with another—seven years later, or fourteen to fifteen years later, or twenty-eight to thirty years later.
I have seldom researched a biography for which I had sufficiently detailed records of the major inner and outer events in a person's life where I did not find the above patterning readily visible. What made these correlations impressive to me was the precision with which their character matched the archetypal principle with which the planet Saturn has always been associated in the astrological tradition. Equally striking was the way in which the additional qualities specific to each unique case consistently matched the other planets specifically involved by transit in that individual's life during those particular periods. In each instance, the basic Saturnian archetypal qualities and events that were characteristic of the Saturn alignment periods seemed to be given more specific inflections and further qualitative nuances in close correspondence with the other planetary archetypal principles being constellated at that time.
1 In the case of personal transits involving the return of an outer planet such as Saturn or Uranus to its natal position, the Saturn return or the Uranus return, archetypally relevant events consistently began as early as 20° or more before exact alignment, and often continued as many degrees afterwards. In the case of the first Saturn return, relevant events and psychological changes typically began to emerge at age twenty-eight (sometimes as early as twenty-seven), and were strongly in evidence through age thirty. The second Saturn return coincided with a similarly extended wave of such events one cycle later, in the later fifties through age sixty.
2 The intensified activation of the Saturn archetype during the first Saturn return period between the ages of 28 and 30 reflects what in Jungian archetypal psychology is referred to as the constellating and potential integration of the senex principle, linked with a rapid transformation, and sometimes suppression, of the puer principle, or child archetype, with which the senex is in dialectical tension.
3 Gertrude Stein, Fernhurst (1904-05), in Fernhurst, Q. E. D. and Other Early Writings (New York: Norton, 1971), 29-30; quoted in Stephen Arroyo, Astrology, Karma, and Transformation (Davis, CA: CRCS Publications, 1978), 84.
4 Tennessee Williams, "Amore Perdida," Michigan Quarterly Review 42 (Summer 2003), 545. "The old seemed to be over. The new one had not begun yet. This was a time in between."
5 W. J. Earle, summarizing James's mature philosophy as having emerged directly out of his earlier psychological insights, in "William James," Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967), vol. 4, 248.
Synastry
The technique of comparing two or more natal charts to determine the archetypal dynamics between them. The comparison is made by juxtaposing the planetary positions of one chart with the planetary positions of another chart and analyzing the aspects formed between the two sets of planets.
◦Ascendant
◦Descendant
◦Midheaven or Medium Coeli (MC)
◦Imum Coeli (IC)
•Direct Motion
•Retrograde Motion
•Stations and Stationary Planets
•Planetary Orbital Periods
•Inner Planets
•Outer Planets
•Zodiac
•Tropical and Sidereal Zodiacs
•Ecliptic
•Signs
•Houses
•Saturn Return
•Saturn Cycle
•Synastry
Chart Angles
Astrological charts are demarcated by four primary angles, which provide important symbolic reference points for geographic, spatial, existential, and psychological orientation. The four primary angles are:
•Ascendant
•Descendant
•Midheaven or Medium Coeli (MC)
•Imum Coeli (IC)
Note: The archetypal meanings and psychological functions of the four angles in the birth chart are a complex issue requiring more exploration than is possible in the following brief definitions. More detail concerning the four angles will be provided here at some future date.
Ascendant
The ascendant is the chart angle found on the left side of the chart that forms a horizontal axis with the descendant. The ascendant is located at the precise degree of the sign that was rising on the eastern horizon at the place and moment for which the astrological birth chart was calculated. In traditional natal astrology, the ascendant is typically associated with the persona, modes of self-expression, how one appears to others, and one's approach to life.
Descendant
The descendant is the angle found on the right side of the chart that forms a horizontal axis with the ascendant. The descendant is located at the precise degree of the sign that was setting on the eastern horizon at the place and moment for which an astrological chart was calculated. In traditional natal astrology, the descendant is typically associated with partnerships and one-to-one relationships, how the individual is met and seen by others, and how individuals understand themselves through their interactions with others in close relationships.
Midheaven or Medium Coeli (MC)
The midheaven is the angle found at the top of a birth chart that forms the vertical axis with the imum coeli through the chart center. The midheaven is located at the most elevated degree of the zodiac at the place and moment for which an astrological chart was calculated. For example, the Sun is located at the midheaven at noon (standard time). In traditional natal astrology, the midheaven is typically associated with such things as career, vocation, accomplishment, conscious aspirations, collective responsibilities, and one's public reputation. The Latin term medium coeli means "middle of the heavens."
Imum Coeli (IC)
The imum coeli is the angle at the bottom of the birth chart that forms the vertical axis with the midheaven through the chart center. As the point exactly opposite the midheaven, the IC indicates the lowest point on the zodiac at the place and moment for which an astrological chart was calculated. For example, the Sun would be found at the IC at midnight (standard time). In natal astrology, the IC is traditionally associated with origins, roots, the past, the family, the home, the private inner world, and the source of one's being. The Latin term imum coeli means "lowest part of the heavens."
Direct Motion
The term direct motion refers to the apparent motion of a planet along the zodiac or ecliptic in its normal direction, proceeding from west to east in accord with the planet's actual motion on its orbit. Direct Motion is the opposite of Retrograde Motion.
Retrograde Motion
The term retrograde motion refers to the apparent motion of a planet along the zodiac or ecliptic in the reverse direction (proceeding from east to west) from its direct or actual orbital direction (from west to east). Such apparent reversal of direction results from the orbital progress of the Earth and the planet relative to the Sun. Planets displaying retrograde motion are said to be retrograde, as in Mercury retrograde. The Sun and Moon do not display retrograde motion. Retrograde Motion is the opposite of Direct Motion.
Stations and Stationary Planets
In their apparent movements, all planets (but not the Sun and Moon) exhibit both direct and retrograde motions. When their apparent motion changes direction from direct to retrograde, or the reverse, the planet appears to stop for a period of time before beginning to move in the opposite direction. That position and period of time during which the planet appears not to move is referred to as a station. Planets in direct motion that station to become retrograde are referred to as stationary retrograde. Planets in retrograde motion that station to transition to direct motion are referred to as stationary direct. Because the Sun and Moon do not exhibit retrograde motion, they also do not station.
Planetary Orbital Periods
From the Earth's perspective, the Sun, Moon, and each of the eight planets takes a different amount of time to move completely around the zodiac, resulting from each body's different orbital period. Here are the approximate orbital periods of each of the ten astrological planets:
Moon 27.3 days (around the Earth)
Sun 1 year (resulting from the Earth's orbit around the Sun)
Mercury 0.24 years (88 days)
Venus 0.62 years (224 days)
Mars 1.88 years (686 days)
Jupiter 11.86 years
Saturn 29.5 years
Uranus 84 years
Neptune 165 years
Pluto 248 years
Note: The Sun, of course, does not orbit around another object in the solar system, but from the Earth's perspective it appears to travel completely around the zodiac once each year. Likewise, although the Moon orbits the Earth, it appears to travel completely around the zodiac every lunar month. Because the orbits of Mercury and Venus are closer to the Sun than that of the Earth, both planets take approximately one year to complete their journey around the zodiac, doing so in somewhat close proximity to the Sun's journey. During that approximately one-year period, Mercury completes more than three orbits around the Sun while Venus completes one and two-thirds orbits.
Inner Planets
In astrology, the five inner planets are those whose orbits are inside Jupiter's orbit:
•Sun
•Moon
•Mercury
•Venus
•Mars
back to top »Outer Planets
In astrology, the five outer planets include Jupiter and all planets whose orbits are outside Jupiter's orbit:
•Jupiter
•Saturn
•Uranus
•Neptune
•Pluto
Zodiac
A circular zone or band projected onto the sky that is centered upon the ecliptic, or the plane created by the apparent annual motion of the Sun. From its early origins in Mesopotamian celestial divination, one of the primary functions of the zodiac has been as a celestial coordinate system for tracking current and predicting future positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets from the perspective of the Earth. For this purpose, the 360-degree zodiac circle is divided into twelve equal divisions or signs of 30 degrees each: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Aquarius, and Pisces. See Signs.
Tropical and Sidereal Zodiacs
As the principal function of the Zodiac is to assist in mapping the movements of solar system objects, the zodiac is a coordinate system that is divided into twelve equal parts, known as signs. As there is no inherent beginning to a circle, theoretically there are an infinite number of starting points for the zodiac. In actual practice, however, there are two major zodiac systems in use, each with its own beginning position. The starting point of the sidereal zodiac, which forms the basis of Vedic astrology, is the first degree of the constellation Aries. In contrast, the tropical zodiac, which is the preferred system of Western astrology, uses the vernal equinox as its beginning point. Another major difference between the two zodiacs may be further elucidated by suggesting that the sidereal zodiac uses celestial phenomena for its orientation and system of interpretive meaning while the tropical zodiac relies upon seasonal variation for its system of organization and significance.
Ecliptic
This term refers to the apparent circular orbit of the Sun around the Earth during the course of a year, as seen from the standpoint of an observer on Earth. This perceived circular course results, of course, from the Earth's revolution around the Sun. Constellations seen along the ecliptic form the original basis for the twelve signs of the zodiac. On a two-dimensional plane, all the planets appear to occupy a position on the ecliptic regardless of their distance from the Earth. As they move along the ecliptic during their orbits, the planets appear to move around the zodiac, passing from one sign to the next.
Signs
The twelve astrological signs are equal divisions of the zodiac. Each sign comprises thirty degrees and is named after one of twelve constellations that are in close proximity to the ecliptic. Each sign is also associated with a specific set of fundamental qualities, which have been variously described as temperaments, personality traits, types of energy, or essences. In Western astrology, taken as a whole, the twelve signs of the zodiac are said to represent the full range of human experience. The twelve signs of the zodiac are:
•Aries
•Taurus
•Gemini
•Cancer
•Leo
•Virgo
•Libra
•Scorpio
•Sagittarius
•Capricorn
•Aquarius
•Pisces
Because Archai does not focus primarily on astrological signs, it is beyond the scope of this glossary to provide meaningful descriptions of each sign. Recommended resources for signs and their meanings include Robert Hand's Horoscope Symbols (Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 1981), Stephen Arroyo's Chart Interpretation Handbook: Guidelines for Understanding the Essentials of the Birth Chart (Sebastopol, CA: CRCS Publications, 1989), and John Jocelyn's Meditations on the Signs of the Zodiac (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1970).
Houses
The birth chart is composed of twelve divisions, known as houses, in which the positions of the planets and signs of the zodiac are represented relative to local time and space. While there are various house systems, each with its own way of mapping local space relative to the ecliptic, all house systems are predicated on the idea that each house is symbolically connected to specific areas of life or fields of experience, so that the first house is generally considered to be concerned with action and self-orientation, the fourth house with home and family, the seventh house with relationships, the tenth house with career, and so on. When a planet is located in a particular house, this implies that the archetypal principle associated with that planet will be expressed primarily in the areas of life or fields of experience associated with that house. Because archetypal astrology places more emphasis on the research of archetypal correlations with planetary aspects than on the significance of houses, a detailed explication of houses will not be provided here. Recommended sources include Robert Hand, Horoscope Symbols (Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 1981); Bill Herbst, Houses of the Horoscope, 2nd ed. (Woburn, MA: Serendipity Press, 2006), Dane Rudhyar, The Astrological Houses: The Spectrum of Individual Experience (Sebastopol, CA: CRCS Publications, 1972); and Howard Sasportas, The Twelve Houses: Understanding the Importance of the Houses in Your Astrological Birth Chart (London: Thorsons, 1998).
Saturn Return
The approximately three-year period when Saturn completes its 29-year cycle around the zodiac to return to its original position in the natal chart. The first Saturn Return occurs between the ages of 28 and 30 and the second between 57 and 60.
For more on the Saturn Return, see Saturn Cycle.
Saturn Cycle
(Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche, 119-125.)
Another planetary transit cycle in which distinctive archetypal correlations can be easily recognized in individual biographies is the Saturn cycle, approximately twenty-nine and a half years in length. All individuals go through the first Saturn return transit from about the age of twenty-eight through age thirty, a three-year period in the course of which a characteristic complex of biographical events and experiences seems to occur with remarkable consistency.1 During these years individuals tend to experience their lives as distinctly coming to the end of an era—bringing the years of youth to a close and initiating the person, in an often challenging way, into the principal period of mature activity in the world in engagement with the established social order.
In examining many hundreds of individual biographies, I observed that during the years from age twenty-eight to thirty, a tangibly different, usually more serious posture towards life, work, long-term goals, security, parents, tradition, and established social structures tended to emerge. At this time, the wider aspirations and wanderings of youth seemed to undergo a transformation, becoming focused on and grounded in concrete practicalities and particular commitments: vocational, relational, intellectual, psychological, spiritual. Significant relationships often came to an end, and others of enduring consequence began. Modes of being that had characterized the preceding years were now outgrown and decisively left behind as no longer appropriate, or ineluctably taken away by changing life circumstances. The consequences of past actions and events tended to emerge and require assimilation, and a growing tendency to engage in serious self-reflection and biographical retrospection was typical.
In coincidence with the Saturn return transit, the challenging realities of life and death, time and aging, loss and adversity, work and responsibility became dominant concerns in a distinctly different manner from how these same realities were experienced in one's teens or twenties. Equally characteristic during this three-year transit was a definite sense of existential compression or contraction, generally accompanied by obstacles, limitations, and frustrations of various kinds—financial, physical, relational—and often including a definite encounter with human mortality, finitude, and fallibility. For some, the years of this transit near age thirty marked a psychological transformation that brought an end to the more creative, adventurous, open-minded and free-spirited youthful self and the establishment of a more rigidly conservative, constrained, and risk-averse personality identified with the status quo and unquestioned conventional values. By contrast, many others seemed to resolve this archetypal transition through the strenuous forging of a synthesis of the aspiring, creative impulses of youth with the structuring, stabilizing, disciplining, foundation-building impulses of maturity.
In either case, the often noted, fairly easily recognizable difference between individuals who are over thirty from those younger than thirty seemed to be associated with the decisive emergence in just these years of personal qualities and life circumstances whose common qualities all seemed to be comprehensible in terms of the Saturn archetype being potently constellated at that time.2 The following description by Gertrude Stein, from her early work Fernhurst, well describes a characteristic form of the life transition that consistently coincides with the Saturn return period:
It happens often in the twenty-ninth year of life that all the forces that have been engaged through the years of childhood, adolescence and youth in confused and ferocious combat range themselves in ordered ranks—one is uncertain of one's aims, meaning and power during these years of tumultuous growth when aspiration has no relation to fulfillment and one plunges here and there with energy and misdirection during the storm and stress of the making of a personality until at last we reach the twenty-ninth year, the straight and narrow gateway of maturity and life which was all uproar and confusion narrows down to form and purpose and we exchange a great dim possibility for a small hard reality.
Also in our American life where there is no coercion in custom and it is our right to change our vocation so often as we have desire and opportunity, it is a common experience that our youth extends through the whole first twenty-nine years of our life and it is not until we reach thirty that we find at last that vocation for which we feel ourselves fit and to which we willingly devote continued labor.3
In researching hundreds of biographies to examine the nature of each individual's life trajectory, I regularly observed that the succeeding three decades—the person's thirties, forties, and fifties—could be seen in retrospect to have been decisively shaped by the structural transformations that took place during the first Saturn return transit between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty. One's first symphony is composed and first public concert takes place (Beethoven); one's major professional association is established (Shakespeare becomes a member of the Globe's company of players and their chief playwright); one's pivotal career appointment is received (Ficino as head of the Platonic Academy of Florence, Luther as teacher of biblical theology at Wittenberg, Kepler as Imperial Mathematician in Prague, Galileo as professor of mathematics in Padua, William James as lecturer in science at Harvard); one's first significant achievement occurs (Marie Curie discovers radium and polonium, Niels Bohr formulates his theory of atomic structure); one's first significant public recognition takes place (Newton is elected to the Royal Society, Georgia O'Keeffe has her first exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz's gallery, Duke Ellington begins his five-year engagement at the Cotton Club); one's first major public act takes place that defines one's subsequent career (Demosthenes's first major speech before the Athenian Assembly, Martin Luther King's participation and arrest in a protest against racial segregation in Atlanta).
Other biographical patterns with a comparable archetypal character were equally evident during these years of the Saturn return, age twenty-eight to thirty, as for example the tendency to take on a new level of personal responsibility and achieve a new degree of personal independence (Margaret Fuller becomes editor of the Transcendentalist journal The Dial; Abigail Adams, with her husband John away in public service for most of a decade, raises their family and runs household, farm, and business largely by herself from age twenty-nine, establishes her own independent sensibility and finds her own voice in writing her letters). Or one leaves the wanderings of youth to enter one's mature calling ("The irresponsible days of my youth are over," Tennessee Williams wrote of the moment, age twenty-nine, when he received a telegram in Mexico from the Theatre Guild that requested him to return to New York for his first Broadway production).4 One's first film is directed (Truffaut's The 400 Blows, Godard's Breathless, Fellini's Luci del Varietà , Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou); one's first mature work is produced (Kafka writes The Judgment and The Metamorphosis, F. Scott Fitzgerald writes The Great Gatsby, Camus writes The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger, Saul Bellow writes The Dangling Man, Allen Ginsberg writes Howl); one establishes one's public persona (Aurore Dupin employs the nom de plume George Sand and publishes her first novel Indiana, Samuel Clemens publishes his first literary work, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," under the nom de plume Mark Twain). Or one meets the mentor or model for one's subsequent development (Augustine meets Bishop Ambrose, Melville befriends Hawthorne, Freud studies with Charcot, Jung begins correspondence with Freud, Pablo Neruda encounters Federico Garcia Lorca). Or one moves to the location and cultural milieu in which one's life work will begin to unfold (Leonardo moves to Milan to work in the court of Duke Ludovico Sforza, Rousseau moves to Paris and meets Diderot and the encyclopedists, Gertrude Stein moves to Paris and establishes her salon at 27 rue de Fleurus).
The Saturn return transit generally coincided with what might be called a period of biographical crystallization, visible not only in external events such as those just cited but also in a certain solidifying of the individual's psychic constitution and establishing of the basic structure of the personality. William James believed that after age thirty a person's character was "set in plaster." Yet depending on the individual's specific response to the pressures and circumstances of these critical years, this maturation and solidification could actually entail a new level of personal autonomy and self-reliance that had been unattainable in the years just before, a new confidence grounded in self-knowledge and the sense of having found one's direction or purpose. Many factors seemed relevant for understanding the variability among the experiences of different individuals during this period, including differences in how the person led his or her life before the transit and differences between the birth charts of the individuals involved.
On occasion, the achievement of maturational independence and individuation seemed to inhibit or close down the sources of creativity that were previously accessible in youth, as if the spontaneous influx from a kind of creative wellspring could not survive the transition into maturity. With certain highly creative young artists, the crystallization of personality and maturational pressures of the Saturn return period resulted in an individuation that both climaxed and effectively ended the more freely experimental creativity of their twenties (a creativity that typically began during the Uranus square Uranus transit of the late teens and early twenties). A notable example of this pattern is the case of the four Beatles: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. After the period of brilliant group creativity sustained through their twenties, from 1962 to 1969, the four musicians decisively moved away from each other in the course of their Saturn return transits, preferring individual songwriting, bringing forth their first solo albums, and establishing marital relationships that precluded the close creative bond of the preceding years. The work the four men produced during their respective Saturn return periods between age twenty-eight and thirty, which began in 1968 and extended into the early 1970s, marked the climax of their creative lives, as embodied both in their extraordinary final albums as Beatles (the double White Album, Let It Be, Abbey Road) and in the first solo albums that each produced. After the age of thirty, their individual efforts seldom attained the creative brilliance of their youth, as if that particular form of creativity had flourished best as a kind of spontaneous collective influx through the group mind of the young Beatles, and ceased to thrive after the assimilation of the Saturn principle of maturity, separation, self-reliance, and serious engagement with the realities of the individual life associated with the period of the Saturn return.
I found that individual variations in the experiences during this period also closely corresponded with the other outer-planet transits that happened to coincide with the Saturn return, transits that varied from person to person according to their uniquely configured natal chart. (Only a transit of a planet to its own natal position happens to everyone at approximately the same time of life, as with the cycles of transiting Uranus to natal Uranus and of transiting Saturn to natal Saturn that we have been discussing.) The specific quality of the events and responses that occurred during an individual's Saturn return seemed to be affected by the distinctive character of the archetypal principles associated with these other coinciding planetary transits.
Such a case is vividly exemplified in the life of William James, whose Saturn return transit happened to coincide with the once-in-a-lifetime transit of Uranus opposite natal Sun, a transit that I observed consistently coincided with periods of sudden personal emancipation and creative breakthrough with a sense of self-awakening or self-liberation. When James was in his twenty-ninth year, he experienced a crisis of depression and anxiety that reached nearly suicidal intensity. This emotional crisis was closely linked with his sustained philosophical struggle with the nature of free will and determinism, both scientific and theological. He experienced this struggle at a personal level in the form of a general sense of oppressive existential constraint and moral impotence. One day while reading the work of the French philosopher Charles Renouvier on free will, James suddenly saw his way clear to a resolution of the crisis, deciding that "my first act of free will shall be to believe in free will." From this pivotal moment can be traced the subsequent unfolding of James's life and thought, with his distinctive lifelong philosophical commitment to human freedom, individual autonomy, creative unpredictability, and pragmatic flexibility in response to an indeterminate open universe.
Human freedom is . . . a special case of universal indeterminism. My future, though continuous with my past, is not determined by it. Just so the future of the world; although it grows out of the total past, it is not a mere result of that past. If I am creative—that is, if human freedom is effectual—then the world is creative, if for no other reason than that I am part of the world. What is constant in my behavior is the result of habits which never entirely lose their flexibility. In the same way the constancies charted by the laws of science are only more inveterate habits.5
James's case exemplifies a distinctive synthesis of the two different archetypal impulses at work in correlation with the two transits. On the one hand, we see the characteristic biographical tendencies of the Saturn return period: the occurrence of a personal crisis involving an encounter with mortality, a general sense of existential contraction and enforced maturational development, a life decision establishing an enduring personal commitment and philosophical perspective, the crystallization of lifelong character traits, and the occurrence of a pivotal development establishing the direction of one's career (his appointment as lecturer at Harvard). On the other hand, the outcome of this period also bore the distinctive archetypal character of the Promethean themes and qualities typical of a major Uranus transit to the natal Sun: the sudden personal emancipation from a constraining reality, a new and unexpected sense of freedom of the self, a newly awakened capacity for the active assertion of the individual will, the discovery of a path of self-expression liberating one's creativity, and a new experience of creative indeterminacy in the world itself.
I found that a similarly decisive threshold of transformation, with similar individual variability, consistently coincided with the second Saturn return transit one full Saturn cycle later. Taking place during a three-year period approximately between the ages of fifty-seven and sixty, the period of the second Saturn return was typically marked by some form of culmination, completion, or cyclical closure of the processes and structures that had been established during the first Saturn return three decades earlier, including one's work and career, significant relationships, and basic existential attitudes. Again, a deep encounter with the limits and mortal realities of human existence was typical (as expressed, for example, in Tolstoy's great novella The Death of Ivan Illich, written during his second Saturn return). An acute awareness that the end of life was now closer than its beginning characteristically intensified existential concerns about what one's life had accomplished, what values had been served, whether one's current commitments reflected the reality of the finite time remaining. The entire spectrum of motifs and tendencies associated with the Saturn archetype again seems to be constellated during this moment in life coincident with the completion of the planet Saturn's orbit: age, mortality, gravity of concern, self-judgment, duty, worldly status, work and value, endings of things, the passing of an era, a decisive maturational threshold.
The approach of the age of sixty generally seemed to mark a fundamental moment of biographical transformation with a quality suggestive of cyclical completion, life review, and structural reconfiguration in certain respects not unlike the first Saturn return. In this later period, however, the completion and reconfiguration was taking place after, at the other end of, the thirty-year cycle of adult activity and responsibility in the world. It mediated the transition into what in traditional societies would be called the status of elderhood, whether this transition connotes simply age and the consequences of time and life's labors or a notably new level of societal responsibility, well-earned respect, personal gravitas, or wisdom grounded in long experience. Often the character of this period suggested the theme of reaping what had been sown, for better or worse. A new stage of life was beginning, at once older and yet also, sometimes, lighter—as if a task has been completed, a burden lifted, an obligation discharged—a cycle of Saturn completed. Both Saturn return periods seemed to function as a kind of constricting birth canal that bodied forth the next stage of life.
Before and after these cyclical conjunction periods of the Saturn cycle near the ages of thirty and sixty is a further noteworthy pattern of correlations involving the ongoing sequence of quadrature alignments in the personal Saturn transit cycle after birth and after each conjunction—the square, the opposition, and the next square followed by the subsequent conjunction. These quadrature aspects occur in intervals approximately every seven to seven and a half years, and last for about a year each time. The first Saturn-square-Saturn transit takes place near the age of seven; the opposition transit takes place around age fourteen to fifteen; the next square sometime between twenty-one and twenty-three. After the first Saturn return at the age of twenty-eight to thirty, the cycle begins again, continuing in approximately seven-year intervals throughout life.
I found that these transits marked with an almost clocklike regularity periods of critical transformation, maturational crises, pivotal decisions, and biographical contractions and stresses of various kinds. Transformative encounters with authority, with limitations, with mortality, and with the consequences of past actions were highly characteristic. Different forms of separation from parental, familial, or social matrices often occurred, requiring a new level of existential self-reliance, inner authority, maturity and competence, individuation, concentration of energies, and consolidation of resources, and bringing a fundamental realignment of one's life and character. Distinct patterns were often visible connecting one Saturn quadrature alignment period with another—seven years later, or fourteen to fifteen years later, or twenty-eight to thirty years later.
I have seldom researched a biography for which I had sufficiently detailed records of the major inner and outer events in a person's life where I did not find the above patterning readily visible. What made these correlations impressive to me was the precision with which their character matched the archetypal principle with which the planet Saturn has always been associated in the astrological tradition. Equally striking was the way in which the additional qualities specific to each unique case consistently matched the other planets specifically involved by transit in that individual's life during those particular periods. In each instance, the basic Saturnian archetypal qualities and events that were characteristic of the Saturn alignment periods seemed to be given more specific inflections and further qualitative nuances in close correspondence with the other planetary archetypal principles being constellated at that time.
1 In the case of personal transits involving the return of an outer planet such as Saturn or Uranus to its natal position, the Saturn return or the Uranus return, archetypally relevant events consistently began as early as 20° or more before exact alignment, and often continued as many degrees afterwards. In the case of the first Saturn return, relevant events and psychological changes typically began to emerge at age twenty-eight (sometimes as early as twenty-seven), and were strongly in evidence through age thirty. The second Saturn return coincided with a similarly extended wave of such events one cycle later, in the later fifties through age sixty.
2 The intensified activation of the Saturn archetype during the first Saturn return period between the ages of 28 and 30 reflects what in Jungian archetypal psychology is referred to as the constellating and potential integration of the senex principle, linked with a rapid transformation, and sometimes suppression, of the puer principle, or child archetype, with which the senex is in dialectical tension.
3 Gertrude Stein, Fernhurst (1904-05), in Fernhurst, Q. E. D. and Other Early Writings (New York: Norton, 1971), 29-30; quoted in Stephen Arroyo, Astrology, Karma, and Transformation (Davis, CA: CRCS Publications, 1978), 84.
4 Tennessee Williams, "Amore Perdida," Michigan Quarterly Review 42 (Summer 2003), 545. "The old seemed to be over. The new one had not begun yet. This was a time in between."
5 W. J. Earle, summarizing James's mature philosophy as having emerged directly out of his earlier psychological insights, in "William James," Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967), vol. 4, 248.
Synastry
The technique of comparing two or more natal charts to determine the archetypal dynamics between them. The comparison is made by juxtaposing the planetary positions of one chart with the planetary positions of another chart and analyzing the aspects formed between the two sets of planets.
Astrology and Humankind
American Heritage Dictionary defines Astrology as the study of the positions and aspects of celestial bodies in the belief that they have an influence on the course of natural earthly occurrences and human affairs. Planetary observation is the basis of Astrology. The practice of astrology was prevalent in the ancient times as well. History of Astrology is an important part of civilization and goes back to the early days of the human race. Some of the well-known civilizations of the world used this field extensively. For example, the ancient Chinese civilization, the Egyptian civilization, the ancient Indian civilization, etc all practiced astrology at some point or the other. Arabs too practiced Astrology before the advent of Islam. Arabs were quite advanced in the field of Astronomy.
The ancient Babylonians were probably the first to use Astrology. The Babylonians were the first to name the days of the week after the Sun, Moon, and planets. They were also the first to set out the twelve houses of the horoscope. Baghdad and Damascus were known as centers of Astrology and Astronomy in olden times. Egypt contributed a lot towards the development of Astrology. It is thought that some of the astrological signs of the zodiac originated in Egypt.
Greek astronomer Ptolemy was the first ever person to write a book on Astrology. He codified the sun sign astrology that we know today. Ptolemy tried to predict the positions of celestial bodies relative to each other and the earth through knowledge of their orbital motions. During his time, astrology was a part of astronomy. Later, astronomy became an exact science and Astrology remained a part of Theology.
Chinese astrology stresses on the five elements, metal, wood, water, fire, and earth. Even the zodiac signs used by them are also different from other forms of astrology.
India has a rich history of Astrology. Astrology was practiced even in the Vedic times in India. Astrology is one of the six disciplines of Vedanga. Ancient Hindu Scriptures too give a lot of importance to the various aspects of planetary motions and its effects on humans. Astrology is still studied and practiced by many in India. It is regarded as vital in Indian culture. It is used to make decisions about marriage, starting of new businesses, and moving into a new house etc. The Hindus believe that human fortune or misfortune in life is due to karma, and karma is believed to be influenced by the movements of the planets. Among the Hindus, Brahmins are considered to be the best authorities on astrology. The astrologers in India claim that it is a scientific method to predict the future. They still club this field of study within the parameters of Hinduism. Hindus almost unanimously believe in astrological predictions. In fact, religious Hindus cannot imagine life without Astrology. More and more Indians have started to build their houses according to the principles of Vastu Shashtra. This ancient Indian tradition is also governed by astrological implications. Hindus believe that the overall prosperity and benefits of the occupants is dependant on the Vastu principles while building the house. Indian Astrologers claim that they can prove that astrological predictions are indeed scientific.
Horoscope is a part of Astrology. Reading the horoscope daily has become a trend even in the developed countries of the West. The Western mind has always put everything subject to scrutiny and they tend to rely solely on scientific facts. But that is not preventing the western people from being obsessed with their horoscopes. Suddenly, the western world has woken up to the possibility of knowing and improving their future with the use of astrology. More and more westerners have started to believe in the possibility of getting affected by the powerful planets and stars. Western scholars have included the subject of astrology in their research. Astrology was never scrutinized and researched ever before the way it has been done over the last few years. In this regard, the Indian astrologers should come forward and show the world the power that astrology holds.
The ancient Babylonians were probably the first to use Astrology. The Babylonians were the first to name the days of the week after the Sun, Moon, and planets. They were also the first to set out the twelve houses of the horoscope. Baghdad and Damascus were known as centers of Astrology and Astronomy in olden times. Egypt contributed a lot towards the development of Astrology. It is thought that some of the astrological signs of the zodiac originated in Egypt.
Greek astronomer Ptolemy was the first ever person to write a book on Astrology. He codified the sun sign astrology that we know today. Ptolemy tried to predict the positions of celestial bodies relative to each other and the earth through knowledge of their orbital motions. During his time, astrology was a part of astronomy. Later, astronomy became an exact science and Astrology remained a part of Theology.
Chinese astrology stresses on the five elements, metal, wood, water, fire, and earth. Even the zodiac signs used by them are also different from other forms of astrology.
India has a rich history of Astrology. Astrology was practiced even in the Vedic times in India. Astrology is one of the six disciplines of Vedanga. Ancient Hindu Scriptures too give a lot of importance to the various aspects of planetary motions and its effects on humans. Astrology is still studied and practiced by many in India. It is regarded as vital in Indian culture. It is used to make decisions about marriage, starting of new businesses, and moving into a new house etc. The Hindus believe that human fortune or misfortune in life is due to karma, and karma is believed to be influenced by the movements of the planets. Among the Hindus, Brahmins are considered to be the best authorities on astrology. The astrologers in India claim that it is a scientific method to predict the future. They still club this field of study within the parameters of Hinduism. Hindus almost unanimously believe in astrological predictions. In fact, religious Hindus cannot imagine life without Astrology. More and more Indians have started to build their houses according to the principles of Vastu Shashtra. This ancient Indian tradition is also governed by astrological implications. Hindus believe that the overall prosperity and benefits of the occupants is dependant on the Vastu principles while building the house. Indian Astrologers claim that they can prove that astrological predictions are indeed scientific.
Horoscope is a part of Astrology. Reading the horoscope daily has become a trend even in the developed countries of the West. The Western mind has always put everything subject to scrutiny and they tend to rely solely on scientific facts. But that is not preventing the western people from being obsessed with their horoscopes. Suddenly, the western world has woken up to the possibility of knowing and improving their future with the use of astrology. More and more westerners have started to believe in the possibility of getting affected by the powerful planets and stars. Western scholars have included the subject of astrology in their research. Astrology was never scrutinized and researched ever before the way it has been done over the last few years. In this regard, the Indian astrologers should come forward and show the world the power that astrology holds.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Astrology Lesson #1
With the help of 3-D motion graphics, Astrologer Jon Stevens explains the rationale behind astrology and how the astrological chart system came into use. A perfect video for beginners wishing to get a good overview of the science of astrology
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