Narrative Astrology Is a Summoning Spell for Stories

astrology

Mar 5

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to eavesdrop on a group of horary astrologers. They were arguing about which of the signs rules juniper trees. As people do when they’re arguing about something only fifteen or so people in the world care about, the conversation got really emotionally heated. It was a good thing there were no weapons around because they were ready to go to war over juniper trees. As far as I could tell, they never agreed on an answer to the question, but I’ll never really know. I eventually got bored and wandered off.

I remember that conversation, though, because it changed the way that I see astrology. I realized that astrology isn’t a weird occult discipline that talks about stars. It is actually a box that contains every single thing in the universe.

And it always has. The Mesopotamians had 12 signs and 7 planets. We have a whole system of houses and thousands of named asteroids. Yet, the Mesopotamians weren’t forced to say less with astrology just because they had fewer symbols. Astrology’s “box of stuff” has always been as big as the sky. We’ve just divided it into a greater number of compartments, and each of those compartments is, itself, as big as the sky.

How is that possible? It is because each astrological symbol is a branching tree of associations.

(It’s a box and a tree? Yes, I know. Stay with me.)

Each symbol branch starts with abstraction. It divides and divides, getting more and more specific until there are paths leading to every entry in every person’s collection of specific experiences that are associated with that symbol. Each person’s association sets are created over a lifetime, and there are billions of people creating those association sets alive right now.

So, how do you know what you’re seeing when you look at an astrological symbol? When you see Mercury, are you seeing a messenger god or a metal that is liquid at room temperature?

The truth is, you’re seeing everything. You just don’t know exactly which face of Mercury is going to appear in your place at your particular moment.

The rest of the chart can help you narrow things down. If Mercury is in Pisces, for example, you’re probably not looking at a database. But you can’t look at a symbol and narrow it down to one thing. I might look at Mercury and see a god, and you might see a metal. In astrology land, we are both right.

Astrology is a subjective discipline. We keep the little circle at the middle of the chart to remind us that this is where we stand: at the center of everything. The reader of the chart is reading with a particular set of eyes, in a particular place, at a particular place in time. The reader’s subjective particularity makes the world. It determines what will come out of the box when we reach into a chart and pull out Mercury.

And this is where the stories come from. Each astrological symbol is a branching tree of associations. Each branch gets more and more particular, mapping a lifetime of stories about specific experiences that we have with each associated thing.

You can’t spend your life reading astrology cookbooks or lists of delineations and claim to understand it. Experience is where the real wisdom of astrology lives. That’s why astrologers look at our watches when we witness a disaster. We are mapping a story that we have personally experienced onto a chart. It is through the stories of our lived experiences that we truly understand how the symbols dance with each other.

I don’t know what sign rules juniper trees, but I can share my experience of juniper with you by telling stories.

I can tell you about the time I went to Central Oregon and found a park that was covered with juniper trees. Until that day, I thought I knew about juniper trees, but I had only ever experienced juniper trees in pieces. I had only ever eaten juniper berries and burned juniper wood to cleanse and heat a house.

Maybe you’ve never experienced juniper trees at all, but I can share some of my experiential knowledge of juniper trees by telling you a story about how hot and dry it was under the juniper trees that day in the park and how thirsty I was and how my mouth filled with saliva when I took a juniper berry off a tree and chewed it and how it magically made me feel more calm and subdued even though I was standing in a place that I couldn’t survive in for long without lots of technology.

Even if I say nothing about it, that experience in the park hums through my words every time I talk about juniper trees, even when I’m sharing the book-knowledge that juniper trees have become an invasive species in the high desert, drinking all the water. My stories about juniper trees taste like juniper berry mulled wine and juniper berry tea. They’re filled with how good a juniper wood fire smells.

Narrative astrology is a summoning spell for stories. And the only thing stopping me from summoning stories about juniper trees from a chart is that I don’t know what box to look for them in.