The Art of Astrology

After many years of ingesting the literature on astrology and puttering unpaid on friends’ solar system patterns, I have to say that those who want to discuss this as either a science or a superstition are leaving me out of the argument. Perhaps it is my style, but doing a chart is closer to drawing a portrait than a diagram.

As astrologer or painter, I am as much of the process as the sitter. The chart, or canvas, is a medium of exchange, that which catches and imprints what is between the two of us. It captures the movement of our meeting.

Blame my metaphor on my ego struggling to express my self. Why else did I take up astrology in the first place? Not merely to satisfy my nosiness.

Let me tell you the story. In fact, I will tell many stories, but later. Mine is first.

Decades ago, at my humble workplace [Shoppers Drug Mart cosmetics counter night shift], a Canadian woman – in the midst of showing Toronto to her Israeli family – stopped by my counter for hair dye. I mentioned that I’d be heading for Israel myself in a couple of months. She enthusiastically invited me to stay with them. So four months later there I was. She asked if she could do my chart to try out a new technique: she'd just taken a course and was shifting styles. I said “Okay”, but I was highly puzzled how a human appearing otherwise functionally sane would be captured by such – well, such nonsense. Sure, and who didn't grow up reading a sun sign column? I had read it as I read Dear Abby, for pointers and hints but certainly not for deep life meanings. And I had dropped both in recent years to grow into the shallow, arrogant, educated, independent-type female [not “lady”] my culture esteems. But I was hungry for more adventure, for wider horizons – so I said, “Okay”, unaware that the mythological plane of the solar system was about to capture me.

For my hostess was no fool. She’d met skepticism often, as have I since. She handed me a book and said: "You have your sun conjunct two very different planets: Neptune and Saturn. Read the paragraph on both, then we can talk." I read the paragraphs. Two very, different renderings [indeed appositional] of the “inner core” – but both descriptions contained highly accurate sentences. I was angry: how could anyone write so well about me and not know me? Or was I not as much of an individual as I had thought? Or was I being gullible?

The sentences that were not accurate were an obscure comfort. But at the time I knew nothing, you see. I did not know that what I was reading were un-nuanced possibilities of energy interactions. Still, it was enough of an invasion of my privacy to invoke my insatiable curiosity, which in me functions as the intertwining of deep feeling and thinking. Astrology has taught me over the years that this is a characteristic of my Mercury in Scorpio resting in the ninth house of exploration – like my blue eyes are a genetic characteristic of my northern ancestry that dealt with snow and night more than sun and day.

That was several years ago in a distant land, and I have traveled and lived much since. But the tool my hostess handed me has never left my hand. It is a trowel and brush for archaeological digging into the past of the collective and individual psyche; it is a book in which is writing the collective and individual experience of western humanity; most often, though, it is a brush with which I draw what I see in someone's skies.

I have never been comfortable with clutter. Much has accumulated in me while practicing this art, and it is time to flush it away from me and into the public sewer. Since I do this best by writing, I shall cleanse myself by passing on – to the best of my ability – the ins and outs of each sign. Not, as is commonly done, to praise, but to damn with faint praise. There is too much of the dark side left unspoken. We tend to think ah, if I truly am my sign, I shall have achieved perfection! Not so, sayeth Sybil, be not deceived.

Each sign is only a twelfth of the whole possibility of achievement. There is no end to the road, and we cannot travel it alone...unfortunately, as I get to know some of my traveling companions. The road spirals ever up – or down, depending on whether you are walking on your hands or your feet.

I have crawled often. I know whereof I speak.

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