Astrology Drives Me Nuts

I kinda feel like a bad psychic for saying this but I don’t always know what to make of astrology. I’m on a bouncy ball of ambivalence. Show me a personal chart and I’ll study it for hours. Ask me to make a prediction looking at a world chart and I’m a hard pass.

I understand the broad strokes of its history going back to Babylon but I’m fuzzy on the designations of correspondences. I struggle with the transits and am completely lost navigating the hierarchy of influences across a chart. Nothing has frustrated me more than seeing a planet in a sign, reading about the sign’s planetary ruler, locating the sign’s ruler and trying to make one interpretation from all these influences. Astrology is engineered for maximum complexity and minimal clarity. It drives me nuts.

I also have a bone to pick with the astrologers that love to coo, “Astrology is SCIENCE.” Ha. No.It’s.Not.

Astrology is cosmic pseudo-psychology. It correlates cosmic phenomena with personal traits and draws ley lines between these purported interdependent forces. Listen, I’m not making digs at astrology because hey, I’m into my personal natal chart. But I can’t co-sign a claim that astrology is science just because it tracks the movement of planets. I enjoy astrology and refer to it often when I think I’m in a bizarre psychic weather system but it’s not science as the term is used by reasonable persons. Science is a system that measurably evaluates ideas and determines the prevalence of phenomena across our known world. Science is reliably predictive. Neither astrology nor psychic ability produce results that can be consistently measured. They aren’t understood well enough to pass any muster of scientific credibility. Which isn’t to say they aren’t useful tools and merit further study and scholarship but let’s acknowledge these fields are both poorly understood and highly interpretive, thus prone to fails. Their respective usefulness is limited by the competency of the practitioner and an informed understanding of their limitations.

Where I’ve found the most use from astrology is retroactive navel-gazing. I’ve spent hours reading different iterations of my birth chart and there isn’t a website I haven’t visited trying to piece it all together into coherence. Natal astrology illuminated unexplored parts of my psyche and yielded some pretty profound insights. Sure, it could be argued that any insight coming out of an astrology report is imbued with confirmation bias. This is true and valid. But it doesn’t keep me from reading them. I remain vigilant of my cherry-picking tendencies and choose to believe astrology can be bridge between the macro- and microcosms.

To put it another way, the tv show The Good Place, is a package of philosophical ideas. Posing as a TV show it presents moral guidance with principles for behavior and conduct. That philosophy has no basis in ‘science’ nor produces an output that can be measured and applied to the known universe doesn’t diminish its benefit. In other words, philosophies can be neither true nor false, they either benefit or diminish our ability to evaluate decisions and choices.

The same is true for astrology. It is an idea misleadingly dressed up as ‘science’. For astrology users it seemingly explains their conduct and psychology by distributing impulses and motivations to far off planets. It provides solace by placing us within a matrix of cosmic interconnectedness. The extent to which each of us transfers our personal power into the idea of astrology matters a great deal.

I enjoy astrology because it indulges my curiosity about a link between our solar system and events on Earth. It’s a rich intersection for understanding personhood and a bridge to the cosmic realm. I’ve considered that human existence is a result of utter randomness and that we’re nothing more than a downstream byproduct of 13 billion years old universe-creating bang. We’re lucky beneficiaries of a dinosaur-killing meteor that paved the way for mammals to exploit their toehold in a barely habitable apocalyptic planet. I sat for a long time with these ideas and there’s not much to indicate our existence is more than the sum of these events.

Yet, I experienced events hinting that wasn’t the case. I encountered phenomena that kept tugging at me to think more about the paradox of scientific materialism and personal experience. If I’m a logical, rational person then I give more weight to the forces that are understood and beneficial to our lives. I eschew magical thinking and pseudo-science. I recognize that manipulation, distortion, and misrepresentation abound in metaphysical communities. I inculcate safeguards of protection from manipulation but protection didn’t provide explanations for the phenomena I experienced.

I still asked, “Are there parasensory experiences?”

One avenue for answering this question is astrology. Going back to the earlier mention, I’ve had a ball with reading my natal chart and reverse engineering bad choices to auspicious astrological events. I regard this as a benign investigation that doesn’t actually matter if it’s true or not as long as I use it as a framework rather than as a directive. I use astrology like I use The Good Place’s philosophical underpinnings, as thought experiments to run through scenarios and possible choices I’ll make. I study it in pursuit of understanding my motivations and influences, never centering ownership of conduct outside myself. It’s an idea sandbox that allows me to safely evaluate my behavior.

I started writing a blog post about The Great Conjunction of 2020 but gave up because I couldn’t satisfactorily answer the question: who influences who? Does Saturn take on Jupiter traits? Do they dissolve then congeal into a new super-planet persona? Where does the backdrop of 0° Aquarius figure in? Who knows??? The blog post was a mess that mostly out-linked to more authoritative sources and I heard Ygritte hiss, “You know nothing Lago Taro.“  I was back to my original frustration with astrology, no clear direction on prioritizing an inexhaustible chain of celestial influences.

Instead let’s talk about Capricorn season. My enduring access point for astrology are the Elemental Dignities, which are the designation of Fire, Water, Air and Earth elements across the zodiac. I get a lot of mileage out of Elemental Dignities as they have been perfect descriptors for understanding the competing influences that each of us tune every day.

To quickly explain, Elemental Dignities are a shorthand description for describing the mind (Air dignity), the ego (Fire dignity), emotions (Water dignity) and the body (Earth dignity). The idea is that a human is in constant flux as our mental efforts modulate emotional currents and we strive to have our ego needs satisfied while walking around the chemical hothouse of a human body. Elemental Dignities are assigned across the zodiac and if we follow their correspondences we’re better prepared to roll with the cosmic punches. 

As of December 21, we’re in the season of Capricorn, ruled by Saturn. My chart is ruled by the Sun and when the Sun is in an Earth sign like Capricorn it frustrates my prescient Air disposition. After Air, Earth is my next strongest natal element, thus it hems in all my ideas but also grounds the psychic frequency.

Since the Capricorn sign ruler, Saturn, is in Air sign Aquarius, the Earth + Air combo isn't too hard for me this season, especially with Jupiter easing Saturn's seriousness.