Astrology A Map Not A Mugshot!

Astrology Is The Journey

The Wheel Turns: Astrology as a Map, Not a Mugshot

Let us begin by addressing the elephant in the celestial room. If you have ever opened a newspaper, glanced at the back of a women's magazine, or suffered through a conversation with someone who learned the word "Mercury retrograde" three weeks ago, you will have encountered something calling itself astrology. It usually involves a paragraph telling Geminis they will meet a tall stranger on Tuesday, and Capricorns that they should avoid making important financial decisions until the weekend.

This is not astrology. This is the horoscopic equivalent of judging the entire culinary tradition of France by a service-station ham baguette purchased at three in the morning. The sandwich is, technically, French food. But one would not write a thesis on it.

The Tyranny of the Single Sign

The popular conception of astrology has reduced an enormous, ancient, and frankly rather strange system of thought into a sort of cosmic personality quiz, the sort of thing one might find between a perfume advert and an article about which celebrity is currently feuding with which other celebrity. "I'm a Leo," people announce, as though this were a diagnosis, a sentence, or a particularly stubborn allergy. "That's why I'm dramatic."

No, dear. You are dramatic because you are a human being, and human beings are dramatic. The Leo bit is a decoration.

The problem is the assumption that your sun sign is a small box into which the universe has shoved you at birth, and from which you may never emerge. This is roughly as accurate as saying that your starting position on a Monopoly board determines whether you will end up bankrupt, in jail, or unaccountably owning all four train stations.

The starting square matters.

It is not the whole game.

Consider, for a moment, what a horoscope actually is.

It is a map. A map drawn for the moment you arrived, screaming and confused, in this particular incarnation. It shows where the various planetary energies were standing about when you turned up, like guests at a party caught in a photograph at the precise instant the flash went off. Some were near the door. Some were already at the canapés. One was, inevitably, lurking near the bookshelf, pretending to read the spines.

A map is not a prediction. A map of London does not tell you what you will do in London. It tells you where the streets are, where the river bends, where the parks open out and where the rough neighbourhoods lie. What you do with that map is entirely your own business. You can take the scenic route. You can get magnificently lost. You can refuse to leave the hotel. The map does not care. The map merely is.

The Wheel and the Walking

Here is where things become genuinely interesting, and where the newspaper version of astrology starts to look particularly impoverished. The zodiac is not a list of twelve personality types. It is a wheel. A cycle. A pilgrimage route around which all of us are walking, regardless of where we happen to start.

Your sun sign indicates the gate through which you entered the garden. It does not tell you where in the garden you are now, or where you are headed, or which flowers you will stop to smell along the way.

An Aries does not stay an Aries in the sense of remaining a hot-headed ram for eternity. An Aries begins at the cardinal fire of self-assertion and, if they are paying attention, walks through Taurus's lessons about embodiment, Gemini's lessons about communication, Cancer's lessons about feeling, and so on around the wheel, encountering each station as a teacher rather than as a stranger glimpsed from a distance.

The signs are stations. Like the Stations of the Cross, only with fewer Romans and considerably more goats. Each one offers a particular lesson, a particular flavour of experience, a particular way of being in the world. To know one's sun sign is to know where one boarded the train. To assume one's sun sign is the whole journey is to spend one's entire life sitting in the departure lounge, eating overpriced sandwiches and complaining about the Wi-Fi.

Returns, or, the Universe Sends a Reminder

Now we come to the planets, those wandering luminaries which the ancients watched with such attentive devotion. Each planet, in its own time, completes a circuit and returns to the position it occupied at one's birth. This is called, with characteristic mystical understatement, a "planetary return."

The Saturn return, occurring at roughly twenty-nine and a half years of age, is the one that has acquired a certain pop-cultural celebrity, mostly because it tends to manifest as a sort of existential crisis around the age when one's friends are getting married and one is still uncertain whether one likes one's own job, partner, flat, hair, or fundamental life choices. Saturn, the cosmic disciplinarian, comes round again and asks, with the patience of a strict but ultimately fair schoolmaster, "Right. What have you been doing with yourself, then?"

Jupiter returns every twelve years and tends to throw open windows.

The Moon returns every month and asks how you are feeling, which is more than most people do.

The Sun returns annually, which we vulgarly call a birthday but which is, properly understood, a moment when the cosmos checks in to see whether you are still you.

These are not predictions. Nobody is predicting anything.

These are appointments. They are the universe's way of saying: this is a threshold. Cross it consciously, or cross it stumbling, but you are crossing it either way. The planetary returns are not events that happen to you. They are invitations to participate in your own unfolding.

Hermes Enters, Stage Left

This is where we must, gently and with appropriate reverence, mention the Hermetic tradition, because without it astrology is rather like a key without a lock — interesting to look at, but not doing much.

The Hermetic principle most relevant here is the famous "As above, so below," which is not, contrary to popular belief, a tattoo. It is the recognition that the cosmos and the human being are reflections of one another. The patterns playing out in the heavens are the same patterns playing out in the soul. The planets are not causing things to happen to you from a distance of several million miles, like a very inefficient form of cosmic radio broadcast. The planets are symbols of forces that exist within you and within the world, and the movements of the heavens are a kind of timepiece for the movements of the inner life.

When Saturn transits your natal Sun, Saturn is not personally interfering with your week. Saturn is showing you, on the great clock face of the sky, that a Saturn-flavoured lesson is currently available in your life. You may take it or leave it. The clock does not mind. The clock simply tells the time.

This is why astrology sits so comfortably within the broader occult tradition, alongside alchemy and ceremonial magic and the various other disciplines lumped together under the heading of "things your aunt thinks are silly."

The magician understands that the symbols are not separate from the things they symbolise. The astrologer, properly understood, is not a fortune-teller but a reader of correspondences, a translator between the language of the heavens and the language of the human soul.

What It Is Actually For

So if astrology is not for predicting whether you will meet a tall stranger on Tuesday — and I assure you it is not, the tall stranger is on his own schedule entirely — then what is it for?

It is for self-knowledge. It is for noticing. It is for understanding that you are a small, peculiar, magnificent participant in something enormous, and that the enormous thing has a structure, and that the structure is, in some sense, yourself writ large. The horoscope is a mirror polished by several thousand years of human attention, and what it reflects, when you look properly, is not your future but your shape. Your particular bend in the river. Your characteristic flavour of being human.

Approached this way, astrology becomes what it always was meant to be: a contemplative practice, a tool for reflection, a means by which one might, with luck and effort and a willingness to be slightly embarrassed in front of one's more rational friends, come to know oneself a little better.

And if, somewhere along the way, you happen to meet a tall stranger on a Tuesday, that is between you and the stranger. The stars, as ever, have other things to attend to.

Alan /|\