Homage to Astrology
by Ray Grasse
I had what seemed an unusually productive session with a client not long ago. Which is to say I offered some information she seemed to find helpful, while managing to hit a few “home runs” along the way, as far as coming up with specific insights into her life and personality.
One of those home runs involved my describing some challenging situations she probably experienced in childhood that were likely coming back into focus for her at the time—the very same week I was talking to her, in fact. (The reason I said this was because of transiting Pluto exactly squaring her natal Moon in the Fourth House.) She looked fairly stunned upon hearing that, and it led her to open up about some of the feelings she had been bottling up inside for a long time.
Now, I normally don’t spend much time thinking back about readings once I’ve finished them, mainly because I’m usually so drained from talking by that point that I just want to decompress. But this time felt different to me for some reason, and I found myself reflecting on the points I made to her—but, more importantly, why I made them.
I thought about how I’d synthesized what I’d learned about astrology over the years, connecting this planet over here to that one over there, looking at the signs and houses they were placed in, and the various degrees involved, then drawing certain conclusions about how all these indicators might manifest for her in the real world.
And it all reminded me of just how weird and even miraculous this system really is in some respects. In a way, it evoked some of that same sense of wonderment I experienced on first coming into contact with this system so many years ago, when I was both baffled and mesmerized by what I was told by the teachers I studied with, as well as that first astrologer I met.
For those of us who have worked in this field a long time, of course, it’s easy to take it all for granted, and forget that original sense of wonder. But I think it’s good to step back on occasion and take a fresh look at what we actually do, as a way to reawaken that sense of wonder and awe, as a way to keep some perspective on it.
How to do that, though? Here’s one more thought experiment that might help.
Imagine you could be transported back in time a hundred thousand years to life in a wandering tribe existing out in nature somewhere, with nature’s elements all around you—the wind, plants, animals, and of course the stars, those sparkling pinpoints of light up there in the nightly dome.
But then try to imagine that your memory had somehow been wiped clean of anything having to do with modern-day astrology. You’d be allowed to retain a memory that there was some- thing called “astrology,” and how it’s based on the idea that the patterns in the sky relate in some way to our affairs down here on earth; but beyond that small inkling of information, you’d be starting completely from scratch.
So there you are, standing beneath the sky, looking up at all those points of light, and you’re assigned the challenge of creating an astrology from the ground up all by yourself, of crafting your own system of “astrology.”
Where would you even start?
It’s safe to say you’d probably pay special attention to the most obvious things seen over the course of a 24-hour day, like the broad movements of the Sun, especially sunrise and sunset, as well as the movements and phases of the Moon. Would you think to even focus on those wandering stars we now call “planets,” or no? And which star constellations would you pay more attention to, out of all of those that are visible across the entire sky? For that matter, would you even recognize groupings of stars as “constellations”? I suspect you would also pay special attention to any unusual phenomena in the sky, like shooting stars, comets, perhaps the aurora borealis, and of course, eclipses.
But having done that much, just what meaning would you start ascribing to any or all of these things? And just how far do you suppose you would have gotten with this project during a single lifetime? Probably not very, to be honest, judging from the glacial pace of astrology’s development from its earliest beginnings, from what scholars have been able to piece together.
Fast forward now 100,000 years back to our own present day, to our current level of astrological understanding. You’ve just come from that bare bones state of knowledge out there in the wild, and find yourself confronted with the extraordinary intricacies that have been built up through the centuries around this discipline, to where we now not only have the luminaries and the planets (including ones not previously visible to the naked eye), but their “aspects,” the twelve signs and houses, the various nodes, our knowledge of predictive techniques like transits and progressions, the meanings of specific stars, as well as the mountain of measurements and techniques that have been developed in astrological systems both East and West. With all these tools at your disposal, you’d now be able to build up a picture of someone’s inner and outer life that can be astonishingly accurate, sometimes down to weird little details about their experience— some of them so far out in left field that it hardly seems possible one could extract those just from abstract measurements drawn from the sky.
Like that item about my client’s childhood issues coming back into her life the same week I spoke to her. Think about that for a second: how can you deduce things about a person’s emotional and family life from measurements of a planet so distant it’s not even visible to the naked eye, from its placement and precise angular relationship to other bodies in the sky? What could these two realms—terrestrial and celestial—possibly have in common with each other?
Occasionally I find myself thinking, this is insane, it’s bonkers. It really shouldn’t work—deducing all manner of things about someone’s life just from looking at these little notations on a computer screen, drawn from the sky—and yet it does. Time and again, it works.
Here’s another example to illustrate just how crazy this could all seem to the untutored eye.
Take the case of famed basketball player Michael Jordan, born on February 7, 1963. One of the many distinguishing features of his horoscope is the fact that Jupiter is the highest planet in his chart, positioned in the sign of Pisces. As I’ve written about elsewhere, Jupiter elevated in the horoscope can sometimes be an indicator of success or popularity (providing the rest of the horoscope is supportive), and that was certainly true in Jordan’s case.
But as I was watching the documentary series about Jordan and the Chicago Bulls basketball team titled “The Last Dance” not long ago, another interesting fact caught my attention. The documentary mentioned how he made 90 million dollars playing for the Bulls, but he actually made far greater amounts of money in endorsements outside the basketball court—a staggering 1.6 billion dollars’ worth, in fact. Not bad money at all for a kid who rose up from humble circumstances.
And what was the product he endorsed which brought in the lion’s share of that fortune?
Air Jordan X (steel colorway)
Source: 2Pacalyp, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Shoes. (“Air Jordans,” to be specific—pretty fitting name, actually, considering Aquarian Michael Jordan is himself an “air” sign.)
Now, remember what zodiacal sign I said his natal Jupiter was located in when he was born? It was Pisces—the zodiacal sign traditionally associated with the feet. So he was not only born with a possible indicator of success and wealth in his horoscope, but that indicator was specifically located in the zodiacal sign associated with the feet—and Jordan not only wound up becoming successful on the basketball court due to a good deal of fancy footwork, he made even more money outside the basketball court hawking a product associated with the feet.
This would all seem perfectly sensible to anyone well-versed in astrology, but from a non-astrological or purely mechanistic standpoint, it would indeed seem bonkers. By making some precise calculations about the positions of planets, signs, houses, I can somehow relate all these back down to someone’s life, even down to specific body parts. How is that possible?
As I said, it really shouldn’t work, not to the skeptical eye, yet work it does. And it’s all because of the secret language of symbolism encoded within those myriad points in the sky and their complex movements, all involving a hidden level of correspondences and meanings not readily visible to the naked eye.
And it’s all come down to us thanks to the efforts of countless astrologers and skywatchers throughout the millennia who toiled to decipher that extraordinary hidden language, with all its subtle meanings and mysterious linkages, until many generations later we now possess what we have today—namely, a rich body of esoteric knowledge about the universe, more impressive in many ways than anything created by Michelangelo, Bach, or Homer, crafted by countless hands over time and readily available to anyone now as easily as ordering a book or chart online.
Over the years I’ve come to view astrology as nothing short of a divine gift, one that I’ve become increasingly grateful for, since it reveals secrets to us about existence not readily found through other avenues. In that same spirit, I would invite my fellow astrologers to consider these factors as well, and remember that each time you practice this art, you’re holding in your hands an ancient and infinitely rich treasure, one with the power to not only understand but transform personal lives, perhaps even the entire world.
About the author:
Ray Grasse is author of eight books, including StarGates, An Infinity of Gods, The Waking Dream, and Under a Sacred Sky. He has been associate editor of The Mountain Astrologer for over 20 years. This article has been excerpted from his latest book, When the Stars Align. His website is www.raygrasse.com
© Ray Grasse 2022
