Ask Christine Astrology

It’s a risky business to draw too close to a king - you could get burned. Astrology has a word for planets within 8.5 degrees of the Sun: combustion. It’s a very serious debility indicating that the planet’s power is burned up, roasted to a crisp.

But there’s an even briefer span in which the planet is NOT damaged by the Sun’s relentless heat, but elevated to kingly status. A planet that is within 17 minutes of arc (about 1/4 of a degree) of the Sun is known as cazimi: in the heart of the Sun. This is an extraordinary dignity, like being plucked from the masses to sit beside the monarch. In horary, a cazimi significator is exceptionally positive, in an honored place.

In early June, we’ll see two different planets enter and exit cazimi for a few brief hours. First, Mercury, currently retrograde in Gemini, comes within 17 minutes of arc of the Sun on Saturday, June 7th. It’s such a peculiar combination: Mercury strong in its own sign, but retrograde; and then cazimi and, of course, disposing of the Sun in Gemini. Who comes out on top: the king or the scribe? Will the message get through, or, with Mercury retrograde, will it be misinterpreted?

On Monday, June 9th, it’s Venus’ turn to be cazimi, as it conjoins the Sun around 18 Gemini 30. Venus has dignity by term in this region of Gemini, and it is direct in motion. A good time for artists, songwriters and the like to team up and collaborate on something royally beautiful.

On Friday night I had the joy of hearing author Neil Gaiman speak at MIT. Hearing this accomplished, much-lauded writer speak so articulately about writing, imagination, and even - credibly - the connection between pornography and musicals, I sat in wonder at how one lifetime can be so relentlessly prolific, to the level of genius. I have his birth data, self-reported on his own blog, and a few thoughts about some of the genius in his own nativity.

(10 November 1960, 6:30pm GMT, Portchester, England. Click to enlarge the chart.)

This is a man who turns everything he touches into the weirdest literary gold. The critically acclaimed Sandman comic, now a series of graphic novels, which tells the tale of the King of Dreams and originally established Gaiman’s reputation as a master storyteller. Best-sellers for adults, like American Gods and Anansi Boys, in which the gods sort out their problems in modern-day America; and for children, titles like Coraline, The Wolves in the Walls, and The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish. This, I promise, is only the tip of a very profound iceberg-oeuvre that can’t merely be summed up as science fiction/fantasy/horror. You must, you must go to the library or the bookstore and treat yourself at the earliest opportunity to his tricksy, wonderful, masterful storytelling.

Which planet would you expect to be strongest in the life of such an accomplished writer? Mercury, right? Especially as ruler of his Gemini ascendant (and yes, I think it must be a Gemini ascendant, though if he was born even a minute later it would be Cancer instead). And yet it isn’t strong at all, not traditionally. Have a look: it’s peregrine, retrograde, combust, and cadent. At least it is separating from combustion, escaping the heat of the Sun. But for someone listed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as being among the top ten living post-modern writers, Neil Gaiman certainly doesn’t have what you’d call a picture-perfect Mercury running the show.

No, the most dignified planet in Gaiman’s natal chart is someone else entirely, and points to what I think is the true reason Gaiman makes himself successful. It is Saturn in its rulership in Capricorn: the lord of time, discipline, and hard work. It speaks to a remarkable commitment to responsibility and doing things the old-fashioned way: no shortcuts, just earning your chops on a daily basis by showing up to do what must be done, to tell what must be told.

A planet in its rulership is its own master, a king in his castle, with all his resources at his beck and call. In Neil Gaiman’s birth chart, using traditional planetary rulerships, Saturn rules the 8th, 9th, and 10th houses: the realms of death, dream, and fame. The Sandman comics which brought Gaiman to fame tell the story of Morpheus, Lord of the Dreaming, and the conflict he experiences over feeling responsible to his kingdom on the one hand and wanting to abandon his responsibility on the other: engineering a way he, one of seven immortal siblings known as the Endless, can die.

Lecturing at MIT, Gaiman said something about Sandman that I found simply incredible - and a marvelous illustration of Saturn at work. The series ended up being more than 70 issues in length over several years; but in its first year, Gaiman was perfectly aware that his publisher might cancel the series after just 12 issues. He knew he had at least a year’s worth of comics in which to say something interesting; but even with no guarantees about Sandman’s future, he planned for there to be one. In those first 12 issues, Gaiman intentionally planted the seeds of a much larger, overarching storyline that he knew he’d be able to develop if given the chance. With Saturn in its rulership in Capricorn, he paced himself, planned ahead, and eventually found that time was indeed on his side when the series was renewed and continued. In the end, he was able to tell Dream’s story just the way he had planned from Sandman’s very earliest days.

Gaiman said at his talk at MIT that one of the wonders of science fiction is that it invites us to ask the question, “What if?” It’s the question that leads to every creation. Something must be imagined before it can be made real, whether it’s a story or a skyscraper. Capricorn, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, is the sign of the seed buried in the earth at the winter solstice. It is a little piece of potential, a little bit of “what if” that, if it is fortunate enough to land on sufficiently fertile ground, might one day become “what is.”

There is so much more to say about Neil Gaiman’s birth chart. The star Menkalinan rises, which is the shoulder of the charioteer Auriga, he who steers the horses of our desire nature. That strange Mercury in fertile Scorpio (conjunct Acrux in the Southern Cross) applies to sextile the North Node in Mercury’s other sign, Virgo, so Mercury does have his say in the weirdest and most Scorpionic of ways. Saturn itself is on Wega, Vultur Cadens, who brings the wisdom of the heavens back down to earth.

Am I saying that his planets cause his genius? That Saturn on Wega drives him to dive down from lofty heights with stories from the sky? It is more complicated than that, and also more simple. There is no causation - it is not synchronicity either - but the Hermetic principle of “as above, so below” that so many cite and do not understand is, I think, literally true. The life echoes the symbolism of the heavens because we are the same. In Gaiman’s case, it is a life of genius: his birth chart reflects his lifetime’s direction, to create and create and create - at genius level.

Neil Gaiman’s blog: http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal. His bio for the Julius Schwartz Lecture at MIT: http://cms.mit.edu/juliusschwartz/speakers.html. Bookmark that web site, by the way; they’ll be posting information on how to buy the DVD of the lecture, and you really don’t want to miss the part about the connection between porn and musicals. (I can try to explain, but it’s much funnier coming from him, and I definitely don’t want the search engine traffic for porn.)

Is the astrological work you do “for entertainment only”? New Consumer Protection Regulations go into effect in the United Kingdom on Monday which will require astrologers and others to put just such a disclaimer on their services.

According to BBC News and The Times Online, astrologers will now be forced to tell clients that their work is “for entertainment only” and not “experimentally proven.” Also included in the new laws: psychics, mediums, spiritualists, faith healers, and other practitioners of “paranormal activities.”

David Wighton, providing business commentary for Times Online, writes, “Some (astrologers) have argued that it is unfair to treat them differently from religions that offer promises of eternal life, although these promises are no more proven.”

My question to astrologers in the UK and elsewhere: how do you feel about the prospect of being forced to provide a disclaimer? To astrology clients: does this affect how you feel about approaching an astrologer for a reading?

After Sun sign, the one thing you can count on non-astrologers to have heard of is Mercury retrograde. It happens often enough; maybe three times a year, for three weeks at a time. And apparently it has a very busy public relations agent, because it’s the first thing a lot of my non-astro friends start asking me about when their computers break down or they miss their flight: “Is Mercury retrograde?”

In 2008, Mercury’s retrograde periods are all in air signs. In January/February, Mercury backed up from 23 Aquarius 52 to 8 Aquarius 19. Coming up on May 27, Mercury stations at 21 Gemini 32, backing up to 12 Gemini 59 by mid-June. And around September 24, Mercury stations at 22 Libra 49, reversing to 7 Libra 34 by mid-October.

This means that Mercury is spending an exceptional amount of time in Gemini, the sign of its rulership. It entered Gemini on May 3, performs its retrograde shimmy, and finally leaves Gemini around July 10.

In Gemini, Mercury is its merry amoral self, the trickster and lover of word games (and mind games) who can talk you in circles and outwit you before you know what’s what. Planets in their own signs do what they do best; so this is super-Mercury we’re talking about: absolute mastery of communications.

How would Mercury in its own sign behave when retrograde? In horary, a retrograde significator indicates that someone or something is going in the wrong direction. Mercury retrograde in Gemini might mean, “right reasoning, wrong conclusion.” The message is perfectly crafted, only the sense has gone astray.

It could also be about reviewing your own thoughts - really examining what you tell yourself about the world. One thing I’m doing while Mercury is retrograde in Gemini is attending a weekend workshop with Byron Katie, whose program The Work is all about questioning your own thoughts until they let go of you. Retrograde means backwards, but it also means reviewing, going back to the past. In Byron Katie’s Work, when a painful thought comes up, you ask yourself four questions about it:

• Is it true?
• Can I be absolutely sure that it’s true?
• How do I react, what happens, when I believe that thought?
• Who would I be without the thought?

And then - another apt activity for Mercury retrograde - you turn the thought around, to see if a rephrase could be as true as, or truer than, the original thought.

Mercury turns retrograde in five days. What’s on your mind today? Who would you be without your story?

For everyone finding their way to askchristine.wordpress.com for the first time - whether it’s via Lynn Hayes’ and Julie Demboski’s blogs, your own searches, Astrology News, or Astrology Blogger - welcome! Read, comment, browse, explore, enjoy!

I was fascinated to see the conversation that erupted after Lynn Hayes picked up the discussion about the ethics of predicting death from an astrological chart. It’s over here if you’d like to see - especially visit the comments section on that blog post.

The only time I’ve ever been asked directly about death was more than 10 years ago, when I was a modern astrologer. I was doing speed readings at a small, private party; the hostess gave me the birth data for all six of her guests ahead of time, and I met with each one privately for 15 minutes to talk about their charts and provide quick transit-based forecasts for the coming year. I remember one woman asking me point-blank, “I would like to know when and how I am going to die.” I was floored. I believe I gave her a non-fatalistic reply about how it’s not necessarily shown or set in stone, etc., but the truth is that I did NOT want to touch that question. Nowadays I don’t think modern astrology could even have provided her with an answer.

Here’s where I stand on it now, having forsaken modern astrology for the traditional perspective. I believe it is possible to predict death, possibly not to the date and time but certainly to a given season of a given year. I suspect it is possible to anticipate the likely cause of death, too. I don’t know how to do it - yet. I would like to know how it’s done.

Would I ever actually do it? Living in the litigation-happy United States, I probably would not. In an ideal world, I would like to believe that anyone who comes to me with a question they expect me to answer with astrology ought to be prepared to hear the answer. However, I have no idea what to do about self-fulfilling prophecies, or about those who let their own thoughts about the prediction cause them stress or grief. And I really don’t know what to do about clients who, given what they asked for (if not what they wanted to hear), sue anyway.

That said - I would definitely not volunteer information about a person’s death if they aren’t bringing up the topic themselves. I can’t imagine what’s going through the mind of the 21st century astrologer who would actually bring it up without the client’s requesting it. Warnings of danger, sure. But unsolicited information about the end of life? I don’t think we live in a time or a culture that supports having that knowledge.

What do you think? Have you ever been asked to talk about death - astrologically or otherwise?

John Worsdale’s 1825 book Celestial Philosophy or Genethliacal Astronomy is not light reading. Its chief purpose is to demonstrate, via some 30 natal charts and his meticulous calculations, how the time and cause of death may be determined from the birth chart.

A page-turner it is not. For one thing, he’s a bit of a ranter; don’t get him started on all those false, pernicious astrologers whom he deems a discredit to the art. He names names. He digresses, often, and often in mid-delineation. Perusing it, I frequently wished he’d had an editor to steer him back on course from his high-pitched rants.

For another, it’s just sad. Of the charts I reviewed, there are drowned children, ladies dead of consumption, a child who takes a horse’s hoof to the forehead; promises of marriage defeated by death; young men, thinking themselves competent astrologers, who sadly get their own predictions quite wrong.

The astrology itself is detailed, mathematical, and stark. Worsdale has parked some of the critical how-to information in the very final pages of the book, explaining how one determines the Giver of Life and the various killing events. I only just found those pages this afternoon, after jumping around from chart to chart, wondering when he was going to explain this key point. Each chart (which is composed in the older box-style rather than the round chart modern readers are more accustomed to viewing) is accompanied by lists of planetary events, motions, and directions, both in the zodiac and in mundo. The method, if I understand correctly, involves choosing the Giver of Life (Hyleg, Apheta) from several possible candidates based on the conditions presented in the birth chart, then composing and studying these long lists of events to determine when that Giver of Life is sufficiently threatened as to be extinguished.

Worsdale, it is true, often astonishes with his ability to hone in on the most dire time of the individual’s life, and on the cause of death. In one instance, he recounts how a lady came to him with the birth data for a female relative of hers, and asked what sort of adventures this relative might have in her life, whether she would travel, and so forth. He studies the chart and proclaims that the person in question died before the age of six, some 46 years earlier. The querent confirms this, admitting she had come to test him, but that he’d proven his art sufficiently by his reply. (He goes on to request her own birth data, and lets her know she’s got about seven years left, herself. It’s not nice to try to fool John Worsdale.)

Worsdale fixes his eyes on the Creator’s unerring laws; yet he rarely seems to express compassion for the lives lost. Too often he makes statements to the effect of “this prediction was made public a full year before it came to pass, just ask the family.” It made me wish for a few empathetic words. Yes, to shuffle off this mortal coil for the promise of eternal bliss must, in the grand scheme, be a fine trade indeed; but while still in this life, at least, some words of comfort for the grieving survivors must be in order.

That said, astrologers ought to know that this text is out there and not difficult to obtain. No, it is not an astro-cookbook; it requires concentration and real work, and its concepts are foreign to most of us peering in from the 21st century. But it is an interesting answer to those who believe that length of life cannot be determined from a birth chart. It does not, for me, answer whether death should be predicted. I think there’s more than one future blog post waiting to be written on that subject.

(I did not put her in the box of astrology books. She’s the one who decided it was a nice place for her bath.)

Happy birthday wishes to John Frawley today, May 16th, as the Sun transits past Caput Algol. Woohoo! If, after all my “Frawley says this” and “Frawley says that” all the time, you still haven’t read anything he’s written, go pick up free downloads of the first four issues of his Astrologer’s Apprentice magazine and have a look. Or poke around his website for excerpts from the magazine and more. Always worthwhile, always insightful, very much fun. Enjoy!

Four of the astrology texts I ordered from Amazon arrived yesterday afternoon, and a nice bit of reading it’s going to be. Let’s see, there’s William Ramesey’s Astrologia Restaurata from 1653… Astrological Practice of Physick by Joseph Blagrave, 1671… ooh, a modern text, Celestial Philosophy or Genethliacal Astronomy from John Worsdale writing in 1825… and Henry Coley’s Clavis Astrologiae Elimata or a Key to the Whole Art of Astrology, 1676. All of these are facsimile reprints from Kessinger Publishing, preserving the texts as they were typeset back in the day.

This last one is making me laugh as I return to Amazon to review its information page. Amazon, you probably know, lists Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs). For Coley, apparently Amazon merely scanned the book with some optical character recognition software. All those old-style long S letters, the ones that look like a lower-case f, have come out as f in the SIPs… eighth houfc, tenth houfc, fourth houfc, third houfc, pofited therein, being pofited, fad brown hair, tenth houfe, eighth houfe, confider alto, judge the fame, judge the contrary, fuch kind, fame nature, moft part, fuch perfons, fuch things…

Sorry. I’m probably the only one who thinks it’s funny. I’m easily amused. “Fad brown hair.” Serioufly.

What have you been reading lately?

It seems my old philosophy schoolbooks have much to teach me about astrology. I’m currently rereading On Moral Fiction by John Gardner, which was a text for a philosophy class I took long ago, and it’s given me an “aha” moment on the subway, another way to think about our three modalities: cardinal, fixed, mutable.

Gardner, talking of Tolstoy, says that “Tolstoy argues… that the ideal held up in a proper work of art comes from God, was originally revealed in action by the life of Christ the intermediary… and is passed on to all humanity by artists,” by whom he means everyone from the writers of the Bible to “the framers of folktale and parable” and so forth. “Note the scheme,” says Gardner. “From God comes the standard; it is enacted by a hero and recorded by the poet.”

Three stages: three modalities. The initiating impulse is cardinal; the enacting is fixed; the recording and describing is mutable. Aha…

Gardner goes on to say, “With the worship of Zeus substituted for Christianity, this is almost exactly Homer’s position…. What the warrior-hero does on the battlefield… shows ordinary men what the gods love.” Gardner states, “Every hero’s proper function is to provide a noble image for men to be inspired and guided by in their own actions…. And whereas the hero’s function (like the function of Tolstoy’s Christ) is to set the standard in action, the business of the poet (or ‘memory’ or ‘epic song,’ and also the business of arts other than poetry) is to celebrate the work of the hero, pass the image on, keep the heroic model of behavior fresh, generation on generation.” 

Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn: these signs show the spark of the idea, the standard of each element.
Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, Aquarius: these signs show the unfolding, the standard in action, enacted.
Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, Pisces: these signs show how the message is carried forward to future generations.

Deborah Houlding has a very thorough article about Gemini - the Sun sign, the principle, its relationship to Mercury - in the new issue of The Mountain Astrologer. Reading it on the subway this morning, I was excited to see she’s included the chart of a famous Gemini musician and celebrity with more than one fixed star prominent in his nativity. The detail I love most about this guy’s chart? He’s got 29 degrees of Leo on the MC, conjunct the brightest star in the constellation of the Lion: Regulus. What does Regulus mean in Latin? “Little king.” What’s the musician’s name? Prince. Ta-daa!