Tag Archives: astrology

Taking a Breath

It’s been a little more than a year since I began posting on the astro correspondences in tarot. See my latest book review here.

This is a fascinating subject and brings these two mighty symbolic systems together. Almost perfectly. But not exactly. The seven planets of the ancient world are matched to the twelve zodiacal signs. Each sign has three periods of ten days, called a decan. Here is the arithmetic.

12 (signs) x 3 (decans) = 36

But 36 (decans) ÷ 7 (planets) = 35 with a remainder of 1

So Mars appears one extra time. The Two of Wands is Mars in Aries and all the way around the zodiac to the Ten of Cups we have Mars in Pisces. A double dose of Mars.

Fair enough, maybe those esotericists of The Hermetic Order Of The Golden Dawn who came up with this method of ascription wanted a deliberate imperfection in the wheel?

I don’t know.

In any case I am taking a breath before I move on to another aspect. So the next post will be at about the winter solstice (northern hemisphere). Meanwhile if you are interested to know more about this fascinating mis-match check out the book I recommend here.

 

A Balancing Act

The Sun is in Libra. Below is the major arcana card that corresponds, meanwhile, and it seems appropriately Libran, this month I am beginning my own personal archive of brief book reviews here.

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Justice

While on the one hand … yes, but have you considered … let’s look at it another way …

Nothing if not even handed, fair minded, able to see this side and that, Librans are the diplomats of the zodiac, and the idealists.

Yes, and Justice is not Judgement.

And here are the minor arcana correspondences:

swords02

 

The Moon in Libra.

1st decan September 21st to 30th.

There’s a decision to be made. Are all the facts in, how impartial is your judgement? Tiresias was the blind seer who knows the truth but sometimes wishes he did not.  Can you see more when you close your eyes?

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Saturn in Libra.

2nd decan, 1st October to 10th.

There’s no way to say this image isn’t challenging.

But maybe there can be breakthrough work here? The insight of the head pierces the compassion of the heart. You need both, right?

 

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Jupiter in Libra.

3rd decan 11th to 20th October.

Time to rest. Refresh, restore … repeat.

A little expansive retirement. A respite from life’s battle, go deep within and tap the wellspring of harmony.

Why not? It’s free and you’ll feel better for it!

 

 

 

And This Happens Three Times a Year … !?!

… And it happens to however many billion of us there are on the planet at the moment, but when the following occurs, it’s hard not to think the planet has singled you out:

Mercury-Retrograde-20151

  1. I got an excited message from the admin office at my actor’s union, telling me that several thousand dollars in repeat fees were waiting to be claimed. I returned the call. After a brief discussion, the lady explained that there was a mix up. A little later I received a check for $10.97
  2. After several grueling sessions with the filing, the paperwork, my own temperament, I went to see my accountant only to find I had forgotten to bring a vital sheaf of papers.
  3. I will do a Tarot and Astrology presentation with a good friend and colleague in Winston-Salem next week. We sent out a flyer with a typo in the contact details. We wondered why the phones were silent!

But yes, the splendid astrologer extraordinaire Ms Sheila Roher, lately of New York City now relocated to North Carolina, and I, will be hosting a fun evening talking about the cards and the stars on Wednesday 18th May in Winston-Salem.

If you know anyone who might be interested, please contact me for details.

But What Does It Do?

The Page of Swords is one who likes to question, to gather information: … Here we continue the occasional ongoing conversation …

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So … these readings …

Yes …?

How do they work?

Both these methods are an intuitive lens which can focus inquiry, and gain insight that empowers you.

But what can you do specifically with tarot and astrology?

Stimulate thought, elevate feeling, refine choices …

Sounds okay. But can you give me answers?

Sure. Like what is one plus one?

No, like who should I vote for?

Well, … we could talk about that if you like.

But you can’t tell me what to do?

The reading is more about connecting you with your own wisdom.

So you can’t tell me if I should marry John or Joan, or Tom, Harry or Dick?

You mean can I answer the questions only you can answer …?

Yes.

Not so much.

Then why would I come to you?

Again …

Can You Be Serious? How Can This Stuff Possibly Work?!

At first blush, for some of us, the art of reading psychology, interpreting events, and considering future or as yet un-manifest possibilities from the position of the planets in the solar system seems amusingly counter-intuitive at best, and dangerously absurd at worst. To think that national leaders have altered policy and personal life according to the dictates of heavenly bodies.

Well it simply isn’t rational, reasonable or reliable.

I recently took in a well presented youtube video on developments in astronomy over the past couple of decades. The astronomer, obviously highly intelligent and well educated, prefaced his presentation by saying that not only is space-time stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine. He also said that we should allow ourselves to consider that everything in our current understanding may be mistaken. Then, scarcely drawing breath, he declared astrology to be ‘rubbish’. This was done without a trace of ironic self-awareness. It was a confident pronouncement on a subject of which the clever gentleman clearly knew not very much.

In politics you expect this kind of thing …

… Surely not in science.

Except, consider the trouble Galileo had when moving the perspective from the Ptolemaic, terra-centric, to the helio-centric that we now understand as closer to the actual mechanics.

 

I once played Neils Bohr, the great Danish scientist, the founder of Quantum Physics. I grappled to understand the physics and the maths in the play, falling short by quite a distance. But I did gain the knowledge that at a sub-atomic level a particle can also be a field. That is significant.

When you also consider that we, inhabiting three dimensional space-time, see everything at a certain speed, and that, to quote George MacDonald, “size is nothing, but form is much”, and also, as Zoroaster is reputed to have declared, “as above, so below.”

I have seen variations of the idea that solar systemic construction is analogous to molecular and atomic structure expressed in; Marvel comics, in at least two of the novels of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and in that excellent exposition by Rodney Collin Smith in his book, Theory of Celestial Influence. And while the correspondences may not be exact, it is a starting point for those of us (like me) who lack the physics, the maths, the geometry, to discuss with empirical proofs.

Douglas Adams had it right when in the opening paragraph of his masterpiece, Hitch-hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, he said, “Space is big, really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

For your consideration here is a splendid scale model. If you watch you will notice that the creators of this model are considering the orbit of Neptune to be the outer boundary of the solar system … apart from that, it’s great for a sense of the spaces involved.

Not only is Space big in the ordinary sense of miles, light-years, and similar metrics raised to the nth degree. It is big by successive orders of magnitude.

Personal space, social space, global space, solar space, galactic space, inter-galactic … inter-universal, inter-dimensional? And going in the other direction to the infinite smallness of the sub-atomic, relationships of distance, motion, speed, energy are what holds matter together.

The great Russian thinker Piotr Demianovitch Ouspensky put it simply when he explained in his book ‘Tertium Organum’ that the trace of a movement of a body in any direction perpendicular to itself is its fourth dimensional aspect.

A point moved in any direction will demonstrate in the trace of its movement; a line.

A line moved in any perpendicular direction to itself, will, in the trace of that motion, describe a plane.

A Plane moved perpendicularly to the plane in which it lies, will become by its trace, a solid.

And, a three dimensional body with its motion traced will describe the fourth dimensional aspect of its existence.

The fourth dimension is what we call time.

Sir Isaac Newton invented calculus. By formula he was able to move between dimensions. The area of a circle when raised a dimension by calculus becomes the volume of a sphere.

What if our three dimensional perception of solar motion and the motion of the Sun’s planetary family is inadequate to the fourth dimensional influences that fall upon us? What would the next higher dimensional aspect of the body of the solar system look like if we were able to perceive it?

I have no idea of the exact validity of these conjectures, but as someone with an aspected Uranus in Leo in the 11th, I very much enjoy views which are conventionally supposed to be heretical. A highly articulate example of such is here

I invite discussion, disputation, and other free exchange of ideas from skeptics and those better qualified than I. Do bear in mind though, at an intuitive level I don’t need convincing. After all, it seems self-evident that certain national leaders in several divers countries were put here to make Nostradamus look good.

How I Got Involved

Why should a United_Statesmiddle-aged, British/Australian character-actor living in the USA, be involved with this kind of hocus-pocus?

I’ve had a couple of significant experiences with divinatory systems. Aged 15 I was at North Sydney Boys High School in Australia, and the maths teacher offered to do a palm reading for each of us in exchange for being allowed to keep a print of our hands. I accepted.

Australia

I’d been at the school for about 3 weeks and had never spoken with this man. He began the reading by saying, “The first thing that struck me about this was — an actor.” It hit me between the eyes. How did he know?

About 7 years later in London I went to a psychic. When I sat down he said, “There’s a big Australian flag above your head.” Later he told me, “Your life is Greek myths in the suburbs.” And so it has proved to be.

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Again later, I became friendly with an elderly Scottish sculptress who used to read tea-leaves. To sit with her in positive, energized, creative presence was a lovely experience, and she was the sort of person who seemed to know “the mystery of things”.

From an early age, I knew that there were “more things in heaven and earth …”

I’m no more than ordinarily psychic, by which I mean that I believe we all are, to greater or lesser degree. But I reckon intuition to be an equal function with intellect. And I take the view that daily life is full of information that could be useful to us. If we knew how to read the clouds, the stars or the wind, we might be able to expand our ability to influence the path of our own lives.

Tarot and Astrology are compatible lenses through which we can view circumstance, and look for meaning.

At one point in my youth I had a job in a bookshop. One of my co-workers gave me a deck of tarot cards, saying, “Here, I think you might be interested in this.” This was a puzzling event. I left the bookshop soon after, and lost touch with the giver of the cards. I would pore over the deck (The Marseille Deck) wondering what any of it meant. I didn’t know it then, but in gifting the cards he was following a tradition.

There were other experiences which were also like pointers. Just before my first Saturn return I read Liz Greene’s book: Saturn, a New Look at an Old Devil. I admired the book as having a depth of scholarship, and some academic weight. I had similar feelings of relish and pleasure at finding a piece of code that explained a facet of mystery, as when previously reading Ouspensky.

And so on …

It was a while though before I began to study seriously. Presently, I have opposing but not contradictory experiences: on the one hand, the more I know and understand I’m aware of how endlessly much more there is to know and understand. On the other, every piece of understanding gained is like a signpost on a return journey.

What about you? Do the cards or the stars call to you too?