Astrology - The Mystery

This was my first ever blog post, dated 11 August 2006, when it was unlikely to have been read by anybody. I repeated it 5 years later in 2011, and feel inclined to give it another re-airing today, illustrations added. My views still haven't changed.

I don't know how astrology works. Nobody does. Most astrologers find some way of explaining it. Some are unacceptable, even to me. This is how I see it:

The Universe is full of energies, forces, elements of which we know very little, if anything. More and more is being discovered as the years pass. I believe there are "energies" for want of a better word, or perhaps a better description would be "a kind of atmospheric soup", to which our human bodies react, starting with our first breath after birth, as a separate entity from our mothers.


With our first breath we are "imprinted" (again for want of a better word) with a pattern or blueprint based on the mix of energies at that very minute, in that particular place. This imprint blends with the genetically inherited flesh and blood from which we are formed. From centuries of observation, it would appear that these "energies" have some connection with the planets and lights (Sun & Moon) in our solar system, and their movements around the ecliptic. The planets themselves could be acting, to our eyes, in a way akin to the hands of a clock, indicators of cycles of time, overlapping cycles, repeating cycles - a complex network of cycles.

As we grow, the planets and their movement - transits - continue to have relevance, because our imprinted circuitry is sensitive to them, especially as the planets pass over certain areas. From my own experience, this occurs on a much lesser scale than the text books indicate. The outer, slow moving planets can affect our lives to varying degrees at a few specific points in any life span...but not every day, every week, or even every year. Most of the time we are free-wheeling, following an inborn blueprint, living our lives using free will, making our own mistakes, enjoying our own triumphs. A few times in a life, though, the Cosmos steps in and a particular configuration of planets trigger the imprint and re-direct matters. Even then it remains in our hands as to how we react to this re-direction. These especially sensitive configurations occur cyclically.

Astrology has a long, long history, reaching back further even than we can know. Knowledge passed down through centuries might well have become mangled, mis-translated, or politically censored and manipulated from time to time, a similar fate will have applied to the Bible and other holy books.

In ancient times people tried to understand the unknowable in the best way they could. They used fables, deities, archetypes, and strange symbolic glyphs to describe ideas which could not otherwise be explained. Generations of astrologers have updated these ancient concepts using modern expression, but the unwritten core of astrological knowledge remains within its modern understanding.

The notion that planets, and various accurately measured points on an astrological chart can affect our lives may seem incredible, yet there ARE patterns. Just as the planets move in regular defineable cycles, there are rhythms and patterns in all our lives. There are patterns of personality which can be seen to emerge based on positions of the planets and the angles they make with one another at the time of birth. There are patterns in the stages of our lives. There is a rhythm, in time to the slow dance of our planets.

COMMENTS from 2011
Wisewebwoman
I agree, T, what we know amounts to a head of a pin in the scale of the universe.
XO
WWW

Gian Paul This post of yours, Twilight, merits to be published not only once every 5 years, but every year. Make it a habit!

A personal reflection: it's all larger than just human destiny. Admittedly our own life/life experiences are the best ground for observation, but many other entities (states, corporations, associations, even conspiracies etc.) obey astrological patterns. What's created has by definition an hour of birth, hours of peaking or bottoming out, of death and renovation. So it's not only us little human individuals who are concerned.

mary beth
this is, by far, the very best articulation of my own position on astrology and its gratifying to see it out here in print. may many see it.

Hieronimuss

This is how I missed my subway stop last night. There was a voice in my screaming: Astrology really works! I was reading the article in the Mountain Astrologer on the Wikileak founder Assange and was looking at the transits when he supposedly "raped". Huh, Venus Mars conjoined his natal Uranus/Pluto and much more... It does work, but there are no two same ways of how we'll accept it, because it's not just mental, it's emotional, archetypal, social...

James Higham
I don't know how astrology works. Nobody does. Most astrologers find some way of explaining it. Some are unacceptable, even to me.

You seem to have a fair grasp of it now though.