Probably everyone has looked at a book of Astrology. To read your profile or that of a family member, a friend or a co-worker, can be very entertaining. You will always notice that the profiles are not totally accurate. Why is this? The answer is quite simple and will be answered in this essay. Astrology is the study of the correlation of the heavenly bodies and human affairs. First we must calculate the positions of the planets, relative to a specific geographical and chronological location. Then we extrapolate the data to create a profile of a specific person.
Humans have always been fascinated by the night sky. Astrology has been practised by many different cultures since the dawn of history. This fact is key because more can be learned from simple observation than any other means. A person might go to university and study child behaviour or the life cycle of a salmon for example. Another person who simply observed children or salmons would probably come to understand more than the scholar.
If the observations of many generations are preserved and collated; a vast data bank is created. Many indigenous folks the world over have a thorough knowledge of medicinal herbs for this reason. They have inherited the fruits of thousands of years of observation. Astrology was developed in this way. People observed the movement of the planets and related those movements to human affairs. When enough observations had been made, many patterns became evident. Cryptology utilizes this fact and the Chinese oracle of the I Ching was developed in a like manner.
We will now examine the practical application of Astrology. The universe is cyclical. It is in perfect dynamic balance and subject to one law. Mankind endeavours to discover the secret of universal law. We cannot change the law but we can certainly live with more grace if we know the law. This is the true value of Astrology. To know ourselves and to understand others.
In the pursuit of Astrology, it is necessary to suspend your disbelief. Every person is born with unique traits. Our innate strengths and weaknesses are very predictable because they are mirrored in the sky. A birth chart is a graphic representation of the position of the planets at the instant of a person's birth, in relation to the geographical location of that birth. From this birth chart, we can create an accurate personal profile.
The positions of the planets and their angular relationships to each other are important factors in the interpretation of a birth chart. Astrologists call the angular relationships aspects. They are depicted as red and black lines on a birth chart. Every birth chart is unique. A birth chart is mapped on a circle divided into twelve equal sections. These sections are called houses. Each house represents an area of human life, such as finance, education, death, relationships and communication.
On the outer rim of a birth chart, there are twelve more divisions. These divisions represent the sky overhead and are named for the constellations that reside in each zone. These constellations are those that give us the twelve signs of the zodiac. The zodiac signs do not usually synchronize with the houses. The horizontal line through the centre of a birth chart represents the horizon. The horizon rotates counter-clockwise while the planets move clockwise. The planets used in Astrology each represent the rulers of a particular facet of our human life such as health, cognition, strength, humour and sexuality.
There are three basic features on a birth chart. Firstly, there is a sun sign. This is the zodiac sign that the sun happens to occupy. Secondly, there is an ascendant. This is the zodiac sign that is rising on the left side of the horizon. Thirdly, there is a mid-heaven. This is the zodiac sign that is directly above the location of the birth. These three items may possibly have three different zodiac signs.
It is also possible for the sun to share the zodiac sign of other items. The zodiac sign of the sun gives a profile of the external personality. This is the information that we read about in newspaper horoscopes. But the zodiac sign of the ascendant gives us a profile of the intimate personality. The zodiac sign of the mid-heaven gives a profile of the person whom we aspire to become. Interestingly, the zodiac sign of the mid-heaven is very often the same as the sun sign of people whom we admire.
Now we have an answer to the question of why the sun sign paper-back profiles are not totally accurate. It is because two thirds of the equation has been neglected! The profile of the sign of the mid-heaven and the profile of the sign of the ascendant must be interpreted as well. The aspects are also to be interpreted for even greater accuracy.
Some astrologers consider a fourth item, the immum coeli. This is the zodiac sign that is directly below the location of the birth. A person's attitude toward our planet is revealed by the immum coeli. I encourage you to make your own birth chart and then to read the profiles of the zodiac signs of the first three items listed above. You will be amazed by the uncanny accuracy of your results. A wonderful resource book about the creation and interpretation of birth charts is Parker's Astrology by Julia and Derek Parker.
What can we learn from a birth chart? A birth chart is similar to a manual. Many people purchase a new piece of technology and remain ignorant of many of its functions because they do not consult the manual. A birth chart can serve as an owner’s manual. It reveals our innate strengths and weaknesses. With amazing accuracy, it also reveals our handicaps. This is invaluable knowledge. Courage is required however, to examine these truths and to accept those things that are fixed. Determination and psychological calisthenics are required to change those things that are mutable.
Many people make birth charts for others and do not explain their results properly. These people are very irresponsible in my view. I do not interpret birth charts. Instead, I encourage a person to read the results and make their own interpretation. Most people can be psychologically thwarted by a bad-aspect. Conversely, they can become full of hubris if born under lucky stars or mazel tov. The fact is that people are constantly changing. A birth chart is a representation of our origins not of our potentials.
Here is my own example of Astrology being utilized in a constructive way. I have the sun sign of Aquarius, my ascendant is in Virgo and my mid-heaven is in Gemini. Thus I am outwardly Aquarian, inwardly Virgo and aspiring to be Gemini. I also have several very negative aspects in my chart. These are barriers to my progress. Do not dismay. Many people with positive aspects become lazy. People who must strive usually accomplish great deeds with persistence.
The main negative feature in my birth chart is known as a planet without aspects. It is an extremely rare occurrence. Professional Astrologers consider it to be the utmost hindrance and they treat it with much gravity. I was depressed over this finding for quite some time. My planet without aspects is Mercury which represents communication and the intellectual processes. Mercury makes a rapid transit of the twelve houses because it is physically close to the sun. From Astrology I learned a great truth about this hindrance and a way to benefit from it. It dealt with a facet of my personality which had baffled me since childhood.
I have always experienced spontaneous episodes of intense research of random subjects and then a subsequent spontaneous loss of desire. When I was ten years old, I simultaneously studied several languages. I filled notebooks and stayed awake at night. I did not know why I was doing this. People thought I was an eccentric. One morning, I awoke and discovered that I had absolutely no interest in those studies which had dominated my life for many weeks. I stared in disbelief at a notebook filled with Cyrillic script as if it had been written by another person.
Later, I had other episodes with many different subjects. I happily deprived myself of food and sleep. So began yet another marathon of study. Each time the inevitable day would come when my notebooks appeared as alien to me as if they had been put on my desk in order to mock me. There were notebooks on bee-keeping, naval warfare, Zen poetry, chemistry, the history of Portugal and comparative religion to name a few. I never understood the process. The subjects chose me and my enthusiasm was absolute. My ability to absorb information was like the ability of lightning to illuminate a dark landscape. My enthusiasm was then extinguished like an ember that falls into water. I never completed any of those studies.
With the passage of years, I noticed that some of these subjects reappeared. I discovered that I had the ability to resume the study of a previous topic even after years of disregard. One such subject of study was Astrology. It recurred three times and eventually taught me the correlation between my studies and my unaspected placement of Mercury. I discovered that the current position of Mercury at any given time in relation to the twelve houses is indicative of my subject of study! I thus could now predict, in a general sense, my next field of interest. Understanding this was a tremendous psychological balm for me as well as a practical planning solution.
During a subsequent study episode, I learned how to utilize a computer. Then I became able for the first time to properly archive and organized the fruits of all my studies. Now I was in a position to utilize my abilities and to accept my handicaps. I have found a harmony between my inability to select a subject of study and my ability to rapidly absorb large quantities of information and to extract useful meaning from it.
Reality is interwoven and thus knowledge of any subject is applicable to all other subjects. I express myself in a variety of ways. All these modes come to me spontaneously. They burn like meteors and disappear like startled birds. I spontaneously exchange ideas with other people and then cease abruptly. If I did not understand why this was so, my relations with other people would be more difficult than they already are. I have found that Astrology is a good way to look inside myself.
This essay up to this point was written about two decades ago and have learned very much new information since that time, some of it very recently, that bears directly on some of the personal themes upon which it touched. Life is an unfinished book but it is admissible and advisable to add chapters and edit as we live it.
I have been retired for five years now and living a quiet life in Lillooet with my wife and our cat. When we first settled in town we met a nice family that was always inviting us to dinner parties. I have never been keen on socializing but made an exception in this case due to our newness in town and as a way to honour the generosity of our new friends. As is usual for me when “socializing," I would either find a small group within the party and tell them stories or find one individual out of those assembled to speak with until the evening was over.
Over time, in order to be truer to myself I began to decline the invitations. This was likely a welcome change to some of the other regular guests. I say that without intending to disparage myself in any way but rather as a realization of the effect my personality type has on the majority of people I have met in my life.
One day, a year ago I was en route to the Post Office to retrieve my mail and chanced upon a woman I had met three times but didn’t really know well. The first time we met was when she encountered my wife and I on a walk near the Old Bridge several years prior and told us that she had been listening to my local radio show, Bobcat Logic (audio versions of my essays and stories) for quite a while and had enjoyed it very much. The second time was when she requested disks of that material from our Station Manager to listen to. I was very happy and proud to have touched someone in a good way with my work and gave the manager CDs to gift her with. The third time we met was when I was acting as a driver for the local Christmas Bird Count squadron of which this woman was a member.
The fourth occasion of our meeting was on the Post Office steps and we began to chat about the heavy pall of yellow smoke our town was experiencing that Summer from nearby forest fires. It had lingered for far too long and everyone was affected in their breathing and their eyes. The woman told me she had just been to buy some particle masks as a remedy and I joked how funny it was that the most obvious solutions can elude my consideration for the longest periods of time. She concurred that her experience was much the same.
Topics rolled off our tongues at the speed of light as people parted around us to enter and exit the glass doors to get their mail and several hours transpired in what seemed only minutes. Toward the end of this exchange of many stories and topics, the woman quite naturally and with the ease and precision of slipping on a well worn shoe with a brand new shoe-horn; intimated that she was autistic and that there was, in her considered estimation, a very good chance that I was a member of that tribe as well.
Something familiar to me happened at this juncture, very akin to a bell going off in the temple of my soul and I knew that the lady was definitely onto something of value with her observation. At this point I had no knowledge of autism or Asperger’s Syndrome but I had the unmistakable feeling I have always gotten during the rare occasions in my life when a person has spoken truth to me.
The woman appeared at my door next day with a book, Neurotribes by Steve Silberman and a beautiful, original quilt she had designed, made and quilted on a treadle sewing machine. We shared some more personal stories and I retired with the quilt to read the book. The bibliography of that cutting edge book provided me with another half dozen books on the subject of autism which I followed up on. I also read much material on an autist’s website that was recommended to me by her as having good, solid up to date information on the topic and was written by autistic individuals who hold professional jobs in a wide variety of disciplines.
Fortunately my previous lack of knowledge on the condition saved me from decades of flawed research and much biased disinformation that has existed like wind twisted road signs leading seekers astray since the work of Hans Asperger was scattered by war and superseded by men of lesser understanding and less pure motives. I was fortunate to avoid being sucked into the non-autist profit making machinery that has predictably flourished in this era of greater acceptance of diversity in general and unparalleled greed for power and control.
During my research foray into the subject, I began for the first time to understand my own life in a new, more accurate light than had I had ever been blessed with previously. All the stories and essays I have written came back to me but this time I could see how they may have appeared odd to many readers as indeed I myself must have appeared odd to most people including my own family, friends and loved ones. I also came to see how my descriptions of my own mystery could resonate deeply with an autistic person as representative in some respects of parts of their general day to day experience of being a minority in a larger but alien "normal” population.
Yes, I took all the standardized tests that are available on-line to ascertain if my way of being and of perceiving the world was considered autistic by such attempts of measuring neurological diversity. The results were easily predictable and I came away very certain that I am an autist. Due to my being in my sixth decade at the time of discovering this, I have chosen not to pursue a clinical diagnosis for the practical reason that all the available benefits and assistance afforded by doing so apply much more in the case of a young life yet to be lived.
I contacted the autist web-site mentioned earlier and they invited me to contribute a poem I wrote to their on-line "autistic mosaic” of writings by autistic authors. With great humility at having been thus asked and an equal measure of pride, I sent the poem as a road sign to other people (particularly people of my own generation who grew up in surroundings where being different was not an option to be entertained) trying to cope with the isolation of being different and the self-destructive erosion of the masking traditionally expected by the majority for their own comfort.
All of what I had written years ago in the Astrology essay has been fleshed out now in a much more comprehensive way for me with this new revelation. My intense mono-focus on seemingly unrelated topics for no apparent reason for random duration with no desire for personal gain is my normal modus operandi and is quite in keeping with the genetic pathways laid down in my brain circuitry from birth. It has its own inimitable boons and also some anxiety generating consequences when navigating the sea of normalcy as defined by the current percentages of neurological types. I wouldn’t change it if I could.
Truth can be combed out of life and the process is never finished nor does it occur at an artificially imposed pace. Thus, essays, theories and stories sometimes need to be updated with new information as do our own memories, dreams and reflections. I write essays because it is hard-wired in my nature to ponder life and to share freely what I glean from that activity. My recent realization (sparked in large part by a random meeting with a random lady who resonated with my random writings) that there are tens of thousands of people out there who have also been born with an “unaspected Mercury” [read: similar but unique autistic variations] is just such an update for me and the reason I have revisited this old essay on Astrology.
Swedish paleo-geneticist and evolutionary anthropologist, Svante Pääbo and some others are currently researching the definite possibility that the neurodiversity that is shared by the autistic and Asperger’s minority is very likely the physical evidence of legacy DNA of an extinct variety or species of our human genus Homo at large. A particular variety that Svante believes was overcome and subsumed by another more aggressive species due to the fact that the evidence shows that this species when confronted by an ocean during their wanderings, were content to stay on the beach, eat fruit, make babies and go fishing rather than to build ships, cross the water and dominate whatever they found on the new shores and the mountains beyond. At this point, I tend strongly to agree with him.
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