Depth Astrology

Astrology is the study of patterns as they play out through time.

Sometimes we get caught in an unhealthy pattern and call it a bad habit or an addiction. Other patterns grow into rituals that mark certain moments: beginnings, endings, transitions, the rhythms of the seasons. Still other patterns become routines — neither healthy nor unhealthy, just the usual way of doing things, until something comes along to change, upset or improve old standbys.

It’s pretty easy to tell when something’s a routine as opposed to an addiction, a rhythm as opposed to a habit. Though each word means essentially the same thing, we can feel it in our bones when the pattern is unhealthy, or comforting, or neutral. But the etymology of these words can give us further insight into how the things we do repeatedly — Saturday morning chores, for example, or singing a particular lullaby to a child, or that six-pack you just can’t get through the evening without — affect the deep psyche.

Addiction comes from the Latin root deik-, which means “to show or pronounce solemnly.” From the same root grew words like dictate, ditto, indict, verdict and jurisdiction, giving “addiction” the feel of a judicial, gavel-banging, authoritative pronouncement. The addict is indicted. The verdict is dictated. It’s hard to escape an addiction, or fight it, or squirm out from under it. We can only get off for good behavior.

In the horoscope chart, we might look to the fixed cross — the 2nd and 8th houses, the 5th and 11th — to understand our unhealthy repetitive behaviors: how we embody Sysiphus in our own lives, and what healing god we might call upon inside ourselves to get out of our addictive cycles.

Ritual comes from rite, which is rooted in the basic Latin ar-, which means “to fit together,” and which spawned all sorts of English words including arm, art, order, reason and rhyme. A ritual, then, is like a piece of the puzzle falling into place, making sense of something chaotic. It is a small part of the larger whole, a connector that helps us make elegant the empty spaces of life, that infuses our days and weeks with meaning.

Ritual may be the other side of the addiction coin, the bright face of addictive darkness. Perhaps addiction is a expression of the search for meaning, an expression that took a wrong turn. Like addiction, ritual appeals to the senses and meets a need for soothing. But done authentically and practiced faithfully, ritual — unlike addiction — should lead to order and connection instead of chaos and isolation.

There are, of course, rituals that become meaningless or unhealthy, for example through overuse or misuse or because the act of placing the puzzle piece has continued long past the need for the puzzle’s meaning or message. In this case, the ritual may become an addiction because lack of courage, or lack of creativity, prevents a person from seeing life anew, from building new rituals that reflect life’s current rhythms.

In the horoscope chart, we can again look at the fixed cross to understand how to recreate addictions as rituals: what rituals might meet the need that the addiction is currently fulfilling. Of course, there are other elements too — the planets and signs and other houses as well — that must be considered depending on the nature and need of the addiction.

I got into this whole train of thought intially because I’m reading Beyond the Rainbow Bridge: Nurturing Our Children from Birth to Seven by Barbara J. Patterson and Pamela Bradley. The book describes the Waldorf educational philosophy, which emphasizes the importance of daily, weekly, monthly and yearly rhythms in children’s lives. Rhythm comes from the Latin root sreu-, which means “to flow.” In the Greek, it’s rhuthmos, meaning “measure or recurring motion.” The word is also related to bodily flushings such as diarrhea and catarrh; the rock rhyolite; rheuma (the humors of the body); and possibly to the Russian struga, meaning “a deep place.”

What strikes me about rhythm is that its word associations encompass so much: fluid, cyclical motion and the stillness, the hardness, of rock; the humors of the body and their occasional purging outbursts; the plain, mundane task of measuring time and the shrouded, sacred mysteries of life’s deep places. There’s a yin-yang feel to this word family, a sense that rhythm must include both external expression and internal pondering; both silence and noise; both stillness and motion. In fact, Patterson and Bradley suggest that preschool days should be ordered in an external-internal-external-internal “breathing-type” rhythm so as to encourage children’s exuberance while also preventing them from spinning out of control and becoming enslaved to the barrage of sensory input all around them.

The book also makes the point that rhythms come from without and within. If we are attentive and aware and not so out of control in our lives, we internalize the external rhythms that surround us. Our bodies and senses can respond with rituals that anchor the beginnings and endings of each rhythmic cycle — rituals that mark the turn of morning into noontime, the fading of brash summer into more ponderous fall, the growth of child into adolescent into adult. The word “ritual” often carries a religious flavor in our culture, but it doesn’t have to. Its importance is in placing a puzzle piece in such a way that meaning and connection are forged in the life.

Keeping that caveat in mind, psychotherapy pioneer Carl Jung famously wrote to Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous:

[The] craving for alcohol [is] the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness … You see, Alcohol in Latin is “spiritus,” and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritum. (Source)

If we are attentive to the rhythms that order the physical universe around us, we then, perhaps, do not need addictive behavior but, instead, meaningful ritual to order our lives. Rites that give physical space, plenty of time and honored acknowledgment to change, growth, loss and newness can go a long way to connect our souls to the larger rhythms of life, to feel how we ourselves are pieces in the larger puzzle of the universal order. We do not, then, need addiction because our spiritual thirst is slaked by something else.

Rhythms are patterns, ways of ordering our time and our senses, that emerge from authentic depth, from time-tested processes, rather than from our own momentary behaviors — based on anxiety, desire or compulsion — injected into the matrix of time. Disconnected from the rhythms of life, we seek addiction: something dependable, comforting — yet ultimately disconnecting. When we are in touch with those larger rhythms, though, we can then connect with others, with the world, with the Divine — and with ourselves. That connection can be achieved and expressed through ritual, through the placement of the ordered pieces into the big picture of life.

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