What Is Narrative Astrology?
Humans Are Storytelling Animals
In the book Spellbound: Modern Science, Ancient Magic, and the Hidden Potential of the Unconscious Mind, Dr. Daniel Lieberman tells a story about primate researchers attempting to understand the behavior of chimpanzees at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center.
When observing animals, humans have the tendency to anthropomorphize. That is, we ascribe human emotions and motivations to animal behavior. Animals and humans are not the same, however, so the researchers attempted to strip all anthropomorphism out of their research observations for two years.
At the end of the study, the researchers had mountains of data, but they couldn’t understand it. All they had were gestures and movements without any semblance of meaning.
“The notebooks full of observations didn’t help them understand the behavior of the chimpanzees until they allowed themselves to think about the chimpanzees in human terms,” Zimmerman wrote, “so that their behaviors became stories.”
Every waking moment, your senses take in a ton of information about the world around you, more than your conscious mind could process in a hundred lifetimes. Deep in your unconscious mind, your brain is working, looking for the signal in the noise. All that sensory data is filtered through stories. Stories literally tell the brain what is meaningful.
Humans are storytelling animals. Without stories, we are able to perceive data, but we can’t understand it in a meaningful way.
Unconscious Stories Create the World
Most of the stories that inform the way you see the world are unconscious. They are like a pair of glasses you can never take off. In the evolutionary history of humanity, this lack of consciousness has been to our benefit. Conscious thought is very slow, and unconscious stories allow us to respond quickly without having to agonize. Unconscious stories are like muscle memory for the soul. If you ever find yourself face to face with a tiger, your stories about predators might literally save your life.
The problem with unconscious stories is that it’s hard to tell when they’ve become distorted.
People who wear physical glasses know that it’s easy to end up with a pair of glasses that doesn’t help you see as clearly as it used to. Slowly, over time, your eyes change, but your glasses don’t. The change happens so slowly you become so used to seeing poorly, and you forget what it’s like to have a prescription that fits. Without regular appointments to get your eyes checked, your ability to see becomes compromised. If you wait too long, getting a new pair of glasses can feel like getting a brand new pair of eyes.
Unconscious stories can become frozen like an old pair of glasses, living fossils, artifacts of a time that no longer exists. Sometimes, life brings you something unexpected that shows you a story that isn’t working anymore, but you don’t have to wait for happy accidents.
Story Hacking Astrology
Astrology is one of the oldest tools humans have for turning data into stories. The discipline has its roots in the work of ancient astronomer priests in Mesopotamia. Each night, astronomer priests observed the movements of the moon and planets, looking for connections between the sky and events here on earth.
Their observations of the sky formed the foundation of modern astronomy, but the stories they told about the data they collected are just as important as their scientific achievements. Astrology is the psychology of the ancients. The symbolic language of astrology uses the planets as a metaphor to model the systems of the human personality and society. In that model, you can observe the unconscious stories you tell about yourself and the people around you playing themselves out.
Astrological symbols are pure data. When we interpret astrological symbols, we are telling stories. The stories we tell come from our unconscious filters on reality, but telling stories raises those unconscious filters to the level of awareness. By examining those stories critically, we are inviting our unconscious filters out of the shadows and into our conscious awareness where we can adjust them.
Narrative Astrology is a framework for identifying the unconscious stories that you use to interpret the world around you. It can help you evaluate those stories to see if they fit, repair stories that have become dysfunctional, and make good stories true.
Getting Started with Narrative Astrology
Getting started with Narrative Astrology is simple. All you need is an astrological interpretation. If you have a basic working knowledge of astrology, you can provide that interpretation for yourself, or you can work with an astrologer, read a book of interpretations, or listen to an astrology forecast.
For our purposes, it doesn’t matter if your interpretation is as simple as your sun sign or as complex as the relationship between your yod and your vertex. In fact, simple interpretations are best to start with because it is easy to hide from the truth of an uncomfortable story behind a fog of complexity.
In Narrative Astrology, when we encounter a story that catches our attention, we examine it using the Four Questions:
How does this story make me feel?
What does this story say about me and the world I live in?
How can I change this story to make it better?
How can I make the good story true?
You can run through the Four Questions in seconds. If you identify a story, feel your disgust with it, and metaphorically throw it in the trash, you’re working with the Four Questions. Quick check-ins like that can go a long way toward breaking the spell of unconscious nonsense.
The Four Questions are deceptive in their simplicity, however. They have the potential to be doorways to deeper interrogations that can help to dig up and revise stories that are particularly entrenched. “How does this story make me feel?” can help you uncover personal or generational trauma through pain that is carried in the body. “What does this question say about me and the world I live in?” can point to systemic shadow stories embedded in conventional wisdom, politics, or the socioeconomic system.
Would you like to learn more about Narrative Astrology? I recommend my course “Dreaming an Enchanted World.”
Dreaming an Enchanted World: A Narrative Astrology Course
Learn the foundations of Narrative Astrology while exploring the science of perception and the power of narrative to reshape the world through the work of neuroscientists, astrologers, and witches.
