Finding Your Adventuring Party with Astrological Archetypes
When people talk about community, they usually mean people who are exactly like themselves. The writing community is a community made up of people who write. The gaming community is made up of people who game.
Socializing in these types of communities exclusively—especially on the internet—can make you feel like a tiny fish in a school of identical mackerel. There are times when that is what we want. The experience of feeling like you’ve lost yourself in a crowd of screaming fans can be transcendent at a concert.
But feeling lost in the crowd is no way to live, especially when you are just getting started with your work or art, and you feel like you are never going to be seen as an individual.
I’ve talked about the benefits of thinking of yourself as belonging to an ensemble cast. An ensemble cast is made up of people who have different personalities and skills, who are going after a common goal. Their goal binds them together. Their differences make each member valuable and special because each person brings something to the group no one else has.
In cooperative role playing games, players team up in ensemble casts called adventuring parties. Games are designed so that individuals can’t complete missions on their own. They need people who are different from each other, with complementary skills, to win the game.
Real life is similar. Especially in our highly specialized world, it’s impossible to do everything for yourself. We need people with different skills and personality traits to thrive. You can hire an electrician, of course, or pay to go to a concert, but life is so much richer when you have your own adventuring party.
But how do you go about finding your adventuring party?
Find Your Archetypes, Find Your Adventuring Party
The idea of belonging to a group in which we feel unique and valued for things we bring to the party that no one else has sounds amazing, but how do you go about finding this group?
You can take out a piece of paper and start listing all of the things that make you special, but if you’re feeling like a mackerel in a school of mackerel, exercises like that are just torture.
This is where astrology comes in. Astrology is like a magic mirror. This magic mirror doesn’t just show you your face. It highlights your features so that you can see yourself from different perspectives. You can see yourself the way your mother sees you or the way your friends see you. It can show you the way you look at work.
Not only can the magic mirror show you how you actually appear, it can show you possibilities, ways of being in the world that can make you happier than you are now. Some of the possibilities astrology can show you are faces you can wear in an adventuring party, the skills and personality traits you can develop that will make you happy and give you unique things to contribute in an adventuring party.
In Jungian astrology, these faces are called “archetypes.” Archetypes are character types that appear in stories and art all over the world. You are familiar with archetypes, even if you’ve never heard the term before. Dumbledore and Gandalf both belong to the archetype of the Wizard or Hermit. Most of the characters on the TV show Vikings express the Warrior archetype.
Just like every soldier in the army is different, every character that participates in the Warrior archetype will be different, but the Warrior archetype is a way of talking about the things that warriors have in common.
Understanding your archetypes, the places in your life where you will be most comfortable expressing them, and the unique things they have to offer will help you to figure out what you have to offer an adventuring party.
If you’d like to explore the archetypes of your chart more in depth, I’ve created a quick and dirty guide to reading a birth chart with archetypes.
12 Signs: 12 Archetypes, 12 Character Classes
Astrology works with 12 archetypes that correspond to the signs of the zodiac. Using the language of RPGs, you might assign the following character classes to the signs:
Aries: Warrior
Taurus: Hobbit/Druid
Gemini: Detective/Journalist
Cancer: Healer
Leo: Entertainer
Virgo: Hacker
Libra: Diplomat/Artist
Scorpio: Sorcerer
Sagittarius: Scholar/Paladin
Capricorn: Hermit
Aquarius: Rebel
Pisces: Mystic
If you have planets in a sign, it means that you represent that archetype to people in the area of your life that is represented by the house that planet is in. Even if you don’t have a planet in a sign, though, you still participate in that archetype when a planet is transiting that sign or when you are dealing with something that corresponds to the area of life represented by that sign’s house.
For example, I don’t have any planets in Virgo, but I have Virgo in the 2nd house, which rules money. I approach my finances like a hacker, always looking for ways to improve my relationship with money by running my life more efficiently (I’m looking at you, kitchen waste!) or changing my mindset to one that sees abundance rather than scarcity.
Ascendant: Your Character
In astrology, your first house (or ascendant or rising sign) describes the personality that will feel most comfortable in social situations. In the sky, the first house is the place where the sun rises, and the first house describes the way you “dawn” on people—or the way of dawning on people that will make you the happiest, if you allow that part of yourself to shine.
The sign of your first house is like your default archetype or your character class in gaming. People who interact with you personally will see the way you express this archetype right away. When you’re not expressing any of the other archetypes, you will “default” to the archetype of your ascendant.
People with Cancer rising commonly complain that random strangers find them and start pouring out their hearts to them. This is because Cancer participates in the archetype of the healer. Strangers see that archetype expressed in people with Cancer rising, and they go to Cancer rising people looking for healing.
The ascendant is the key to all of the other houses. An easy way to find out the sign that corresponds to the houses mentioned in the following sections is to count through the list of archetypes above with your ascendant as 1 until you get to the number of the house you’re looking for. (If you come to the end of the list, go back to the beginning. The signs are structured like a circle.)
5th House: Every Adventure Starts at the Tavern
Your 5th house is one of the relationship houses. 5th house people are people that you hang out with strictly because you enjoy their company. This includes people you have drinks with or play board games with, and it includes people that you’re dating, when it’s just fun and you haven’t made any kind of commitment.
The archetype of your 5th house describes the things that you bring to the party. If you have Capricorn in the 5th house, you might be a bit of a Hermit who prefers to entertain themselves in private. At parties, you might be the person in the corner (or at the faculty table at Hogwarts) observing the proceedings, while, at a networking party, you might be working the room methodically, so you can connect with the people you’re supposed to talk to efficiently and leave.
Your 5th house may also describe your friends. If you have Sagittarius in the 5th and enjoy road trips, you are likely to have people in your friends group who also enjoy road trips, but you will bring your love of travel whenever you’re socializing or having fun. You might talk about the trips you want to take at the pub or suggest a restaurant that serves food from another culture, so you can feel like you’re getting away, even though you’re not far from home.
7th House: What You Contribute to a Partnership
Your 7th house is another one of the relationship houses. It’s a cliche that opposites attract for a reason. We know that we can’t be or do everything, and we need people who complement us.
7th house people are the opposite of your 1st house in some way, and they bring skills that directly complement the things you bring to the table in most situations.
To find your 7th house opposite, find the sign of your 1st house or ascendant in the list. The sign your ascendant sign is paired with is the sign of your opposite or complement.
Aries / Libra - Warrior/Diplomat
Taurus / Scorpio - Druid/Sorcerer
Gemini / Sagittarius - Journalist/Scholar
Cancer / Capricorn - Healer/Hermit
Leo / Aquarius - Entertainer/Rebel
Aries and Libra are one of the more obvious oppositions. The Warrior is not a warrior without conflict, and the Diplomat works for peace. Together, though, they have a complete foreign policy approach. Libra leads with charisma and diplomacy, and if diplomacy fails, Aries is there to enforce boundaries.
One of the beautiful things about these pairings is that they aren’t just binary opposites. They aren’t opposites in the way that hot is the opposite of cold. Each of these archetypes pairs shares something in common that allows them to work together, but each member of the pairing brings something the other lacks to the partnership that allows the partnership to thrive.
Scorpio and Taurus are one of the more obscure pairings of opposites. The Druid and the Sorcerer are two different types of magic users. Taurus is a wizard with the physical world. Earth magic and grounding are natural strengths. Scorpio is a master of the magic of the mind, going deep, and exploring the dark places. Alone, Scorpio might get lost in the underworld forever and forget to eat. Without Scorpio, Taurus might be tempted to stay on the surface or get overly bound up in materialism. Together, they are able to do magic and complement each other’s weaknesses.
11th House: The Goals of Your Adventuring Party
The 11th house is the house of colleagues. The 11th house is last on this list because it is the house that makes us feel most like a tiny fish in a school of mackerel. When you are hanging out with 11th house people, you’re an astrologer at an astrology conference.
The 11th house doesn’t only rule those types of groups, though. It also rules your goals. It it is in the 11th house where you discover what you and your adventuring party are going after.
If you have Aquarius in the 11th house, your adventuring party is out to rebel. Because you have the goal of rebellion, you might naturally surround yourself with other rebels, but your revolution will get the most done if you have revolutionary people in your group with lots of different skills—some Aries and Libra people, maybe, to deal with conflict or some Geminis or Leos to help you get the message out.
All Together Now
If you bring together the archetype that is you, the archetype you express when socializing, what you bring to a partnership, and the goals you want to go after, you have a pretty good idea of where you fit in the social world of the story of your life.
How about you? What archetypes are you expressing out in the world?
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