Astrology as Brain Candy
One of the wonderful things about being a fiction writer is that you don’t have to worry about being right. Telling lies is the name of the game, so you have a license to follow interesting people down the most bizarre rabbit holes imaginable. All that matters is that their mistakes are interesting enough to weave a story around.
I came to astrology as an adult with little exposure to the discipline beyond newspaper horoscopes. There were whispers in my high school science classes about astrology. I knew that some famous astronomers in the past were also astrologers–Kepler, Regiomontanus, Tycho Brahe–but my teachers were baffled by their interest, and they taught me to raise an eyebrow, as well. At best, I was led to believe that their interest in astrology was an eccentric affectation. At worst, there were whispers about madness and genius, the inseparable twins.
When I was in my late-20s, I became fascinated by astronomy’s embarrassing estranged twin. Clutching my license to follow absurd ideas to their illogical conclusions, I threw myself down the astrological rabbit hole in search of a story.
I had always been told that astrology was fundamentally based on fantasy. Night sky as Rorschach test: Humanity looked at the stars and told stories about the shapes we found there. This story is true, but it isn’t the whole story. Encoded in the strange occult symbols are philosophical arguments dating back to the Presocratic Greeks. What is the fundamental nature of reality? How does existence come into being? What was the primordial substance air, fire, or water? In what positions were the planets at the first moment of creation? What is the nature of the lifecycle? Is it possible for matter to die?
Astrology doesn’t provide answers to those questions. It inhabits the questions themselves. In astrology, the universe is a clock. Viewed outside of time, the hands point to every possible number. The only answer to, “What time is it?” is, “Yes. As the planets cycle through the zodiac, they adopt different sides of every argument. Observe through enough cycles, and you’ll see what reality is like when each of the possible answers to these questions is true. Meet enough people, and you will meet each of these answers embodied as a living soul.
A chart is not a single answer but many. Every chart is a map of the universe in dialogue with itself. Within the thought-experiment of the chart, the answers talk with each other, argue with each other. The sun thinks the fundamental nature of reality is fire. The moon thinks it's water. Together, they make steam, and from the steam, Neptune is born.
Taken all at once, the system of astrology is tremendously complicated, but it is the complexity of fractals, an endlessly complicated system built on simple rules. Just like complicated molecules can be broken down into simple elements, a chart can be broken down into planets, signs, houses, and the relationships between them. Signs can be broken down into elements, modes, polarities, and the relationships between them. Polarity is binary. Ones and zeroes.
There are people who could happily spend eternity contemplating elegant abstraction. You may be one of them. I’m not a mathematician, scientist, or technical person. I am a poet. When I explore the abstract complexity of astrology’s roots, I’m a diver, wearing specialized equipment, living on bottled air. I dive for the same reason pearl divers dive. I am looking for treasure in the depths. Imagery and metaphor.
Astrology is the difference engine of poetry: Like an organ grinder monkey, you can make music by turning a crank.
An example: Astrology says that Scorpio is the sign of “fixed water.” What, exactly, does that mean?
Fixity is one of the three modalities. Modalities map the lifecycle. Fixed signs are right in the middle between cardinal and mutable. They live like Vitruvian Man, arms stretched equally on both sides between infancy and old age.
Water is an element we are intimately familiar with. We need water, or else we’re dead. It nourishes us and cleanses us. It is the source and substance of life. Your brain is 95% water.
What does it mean to bring these two simple ideas together? In nature, what does fixed water look like?
When I was a young astrologer, I thought the answer to this answer was easy: ice. “Ice” came to me easily because it is unmoving and represents the stubborn unmovingness of middle age. (My sun sign Taurus embodies this quality most of all the fixed signs, so it’s not difficult to see why I chose this quality to emphasize.) Ice can be powerful. I was born on glacier-scoured land. The gently rolling hills are the bones of mountains that were once taller than the Himalayas. The ruins of a mountain range conquered by ice, the land of New England is a testament to just how powerful ice can be. Ice becomes powerful with time and movement, but these qualities are not essential (or even common) to its nature. With encouragement and pressure, ice can do extraordinary things. Without it, ice doesn’t do much at all.
The closer I’ve gotten to the midpoint of middle age myself, the more I’ve come to realize (or hope or wish) there is more to middle age than stubbornness. Middle age should be at the top of a big bell curve between beginning and ending. Under ideal circumstances, life at middle age reigns at the height of its power. It knows who it is, what it is capable of, what its domain is. It knows its limits, as well, and, within those limits, it doesn’t hesitate to act.
In nature, rivers embody fixed water most clearly. Rivers have the powerful earth-carving power of glaciers, but they are water at its most alive, most itself. Water that is unmoving–either because it is frozen or because it is stuck and has nowhere to go–is dead water. Middle age can be like a barren icefield or a swamp, but that is what happens when middle age has gone wrong. A living death at middle age isn’t the way things should be.
Springs, rivers, and oceans are living waters. This is the water of astrology, beginning, living, and returning to the source.
I speak with the confidence of a middle aged astrologer, but the answer to the question, “What is fixed water?” is far from settled. Like rivers, symbols are living, moving things. Attempting to settle a final answer on them is as foolish as building a city on a flood plain. Even within a single person, the answers change. Ten years ago, I ran the question of Scorpio through my natal chart and churned out ice. Today, I returned to the same place and found a river.
I would never claim to have a mind like Kepler’s, but it is no longer a mystery to me why geniuses of his calibur have been fascinated by astrology. It isn’t the answers that astrology can potentially give about the future that makes it so fascinating, it’s the questions it raises, the potential foci for rumination.
Like a child peering into a kaleidoscope, the mind is transfixed, staring into the starry heavens, enchanted.
