What sex is her baby? I was right the first time!

My sister-in-law had her baby this morning – and it’s a boy. So I was right the first time!

Meanwhile, why do people insist on telling me how much the baby weighed at birth? I can’t use that to cast a chart…

Horary astrology: when will these blasted houseflies leave?

A week ago Tuesday, I walked into my house after work and had a shock. Lazy, iridescent green houseflies covered every window of the kitchen, living room, and dining room, and congregated on the glass doors to the front and back porches. I’m talking at least 20 flies per window. I had noticed one or two flies orbiting our light fixtures since we returned from a weekend out of town, but this was exponentially worse, and very sudden. “Argh! They are small and of great number!” thought I in horror. “Where did these flies come from, and more importantly, when are they leaving?”

I noted the stats for my question, then set the data aside so as to address the immediate problem. After the grand eviction/extermination (during which I spoke with my downstairs neighbors and learned they, too, were infested), I put up the chart.

Everybody’s talking about making money with astrology

This article by Dave Roell at the Astrology Center of America (great resource for books, by the way) makes it all sound so easy.

All I have to say is, if I could master the lost object horary chart alone, I could name my price.

Hey Jupiter… I saw yer moons

I saw four of Jupiter’s moons through a telescope last night. First time ever! I also got a good look at constellations Lyra, Cygnus, and Aquila. I “followed the arc to Arcturus and sped on to Spica” – that’s when you follow the curve of the Big Dipper’s handle until you reach Arcturus in the constellation Bootes, then proceed to Spica, the sheaf of wheat in the constellation Virgo, which is the luckiest star in the sky.

This was on a perfectly clear night at the edge of a lake far from city lights somewhere in Indiana. The previous night I was on a pontoon on the lake with my husband’s family, pointing out constellations along the zodiac and whatever other bright spots I knew well enough to identify. (For instance, I know most but not all of the circumpolar constellations. No excuse not to learn the rest. I did know “there’s a giraffe up there somewhere.” That would be Camelopardis, which is wedged between the dipper and Cassiopeia. Its faint stars don’t seem to figure into astrology much. Though it is an animal larger than goats.)

You do go outside once in a while, don’t you? Especially at night when it’s clear and you can get away from the city’s ambient light? Because those glyphs floating around in your charts represent stuff you can really see.

The Anatomy of Melancholy spotted in a Cambridge bookstore

Walking through Harvard Square with a frozen yogurt last night, I discovered a copy of Robert Burton’s 1621 classic The Anatomy of Melancholy on display in an antiquarian bookshop. Neat, as I’m currently learning about temperament. Melancholy is the cold and dry temperament: the contemplative.

Here’s the best my camera phone could do. The images on the frontispiece all have astrological symbols expressing different planetary combinations. Impossible to see here, even if you click to enlarge the image, but cool.

The Anatomy of Melancholy

And a shot of the opening poem, which specifically calls out Saturn as melancholy’s primary purveyor.

The opening poem...

Jupiter’s outpouring of grace

In the back yard of our house are three fruit trees. There’s a big pear tree that spreads over the western corner, dropping leaves and sometimes fruit on my downstairs neighbors’ car. In the northern corner, the plum tree’s putting out little purple fruits flecked with yellow. I race the squirrels for the best specimens, though sometimes the worms beat us both to the prize. Then there’s this stumpy peach-producing thing. I have no idea if its fruits are edible, but they’re there. And I did nothing special to deserve any of this summery bounty.

That’s Jupiter for you. It’s all about abundance, and grace, and optimism: this outpouring of good things, just because. Any fruit-laden tree, any leafy, spreading vine, any oak tree relentlessly spilling forth acorns, all fall under Jupiter’s jurisdiction. It’s not about Saturnian justice and reaping what you sow. (I certainly didn’t sow these trees. They were here when we bought the place. They just do what comes naturally.) It’s mercy, it’s Jove, it’s Zeus and his endless fertility. No wonder Jupiter is exalted in Cancer: cardinal water, here comes the flood.

Last night I was gazing at big shiny Jupiter, hanging just to the left of the constellation Sagittarius in the early night sky where I live. Yes, right now it’s in its fall, and it’s retrograde: but when retrograde, it’s traveling opposite the Sun, whose full-on light makes the gas giant look grander and Jupiter-ier than ever. For visual impact and sheer I-know-what-you-are stargazing delight, it’s always been my favorite cosmic neighbor.

And from Jupiter, I was able to find the whole Sagittarius constellation. It really does look a little like a teapot. And waaaaay overhead, the summer triangle: Wega, Deneb, and Altair. More good neighbors I like to wave at, this time of year.

(I wonder why Jupiter is in its fall in Capricorn? Just as Jupiter is exalted in the flood of cardinal water Cancer, then it must feel especially restricted by the single-seed imagery of cardinal earth Capricorn. Jupiter hates putting all its eggs in one basket. More eggs, more baskets, more more more!)

What kinds of questions can horary astrology answer?

In my in-box this morning: “Christine, do you help your clients form their horary questions? My case is complicated and I’m not sure how to phrase it for maximum effect.”

It’s a good question. Whether you’re looking for an astrologer’s help or practicing your own horary skills, asking the right horary question is at the root of the whole process. The question and its answer are born in the same moment, so it pays to take some time to think about what is most important to you and what you really need to know. I can’t come up with your question for you, but I can help you understand what horary astrology can do and give you some tips about formulating what you want to ask.

Simply put, horary astrology is excellent at answering two types of questions: present circumstances (such as, “What’s going on in my marriage?”, “Does he like me?”) and future trends (“Will I get the job and will it pay well?”, “Should I move to London or stay here?” , “Will he leave her for me?”).

Especially if your case is complicated, you want to think about what you specifically need to know now, whether it’s information to help you make a decision, or something to give you peace of mind, or something to confirm a hunch. Some background details can be helpful to me as I work on the chart – I’ll always ask for more information if I need it – but you really want to narrow the story down to a specific question.

Here are some examples of horary questions I’ve answered:

• When will my house sell?
• Should I pursue a more meaningful relationship with X, or should we just stay friends?
• Will I get into graduate school, and will any of them offer me funding?
• Is he the one? Will we be together, and if so, when?
• My husband, a chiropractor, is being punished by the licensing board – should he accept the punishment they’ve put forward, or should he appeal? Would getting a different lawyer make a difference?
• Should I move my elderly mother to a nursing home closer to where I live? Is it worth all the upheaval?

Some of these do sound complicated, especially the compound questions. But they are specific, direct, and focused, and they show that each querent (the person asking the question) has put serious thought into what’s most important to him or her at that moment.

The other thing that usually helps a querent focus is knowing that they’re paying by the question. Funny how often that helps a person answer her own question without any help from me.

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Can I answer a horary question for you? Email me at christine at askchristine.info – I’d love to help. My rate is US$50 per question. Or visit my website, askchristine.info, for more information.

Burckhardt’s Mystical Astrology According to Ibn ‘Arabi

Not even 50 pages and still one of the toughest astrology texts I’ve read, Mystical Astrology According to Ibn ‘Arabi is a super-concise, super-dense explanation of the symbolism underlying traditional, spiritual astrology.

Quick context: Ibn ‘Arabi was a great 12th-13th century thinker and a prodigious writer, born in Moorish Spain and dying at age 76 in Damascus. You can learn about Ibn ‘Arabi at the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society.

Titus Burckhardt was a 20th century German Swiss thinker and writer of the traditionalist or perennialist school who published the work of Ibn ‘Arabi and others. More information from World Wisdom Books.

This weekend I read Mystical Astrology in six- or seven-page bouts, pencil in hand, dictionary in lap. I think I understood about 25% of what I read, and I take that to be a significant gain over my original attempt to read it (which was hopeless). Here’s some of what I understood from it this time.

• Just because something may be empirically true doesn’t necessarily make it experientially relevant. It may even be harmful. Case in point: spiritual astrology is based on the geocentric perspective: our human experience or perception that the sun, moon, planets and stars move around us. Now, we know the heliocentric truth of the matter: there is a solar system, earth moves around the sun, etc. Though that is the universe’s construction, Burckhardt writes, “the possibility of conceiving the planetary world as if one were contemplating it from the non-human position… had produced an intellectual dis-equilibrium which shows clearly that the ‘artificial’ extension of the empirical knowledge has in it something of the abnormal, and that it is, intellectually, not only indifferent but even detrimental.” Burckhardt also quotes traditionalist thinker Frithjof Schuon as saying, “the destruction of the natural and immediate symbolism of facts – such as the flat form of the earth or the circular movement of the sun – brings about serious inconvenience for the civilisation wherein they are produced.”

• There is a hierarchy of celestial spheres, in which the sun actually does take a central role: it has its own sphere, with an equal number of spheres above and below it. This extends what I knew about planetary spheres, adding in lower spheres for the elements and higher spheres beyond that of the fixed stars. But “only the planetary spheres and those of the fixed stars correspond as such to the sensible experience.”

• I already knew of the importance of the numbers 3 and 4 in astrology. Three is the number of modalities; four is the number of elements (or, as described here, the two pairs hot/cold and dry/moist, which combine to form the elements). And I knew that 3 + 4 gives us the 7 of the planets; and 3 x 4 gives us the 12 of the signs. But this is the first place I’ve read about the significance of the Pythagorean sum of numbers 1 through 7, which produces 28: the number of lunar mansions. Burckhardt says, “the lunar rhythm develops or exposes, in a successive mode, all the possibilities contained in the archetypes” of the sky.

• There is a lovely business about the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet being the microcosmic expression of those 28 macrocosmic lunar mansions. And the Arabic hiatus, the first letter which is “not properly speaking a sound, but only a transitory instant between silence and locution,” corresponds (to me) gorgeously with 0 Aries, the initial A sound of AUM – the first impulse to engage, whether with word, breath, or activity, in the world.

But there’s as much or more in the book that I didn’t understand. And I’m not even sure I’ve got all this right. I’ll let it cook on the back burner for a few months.