Depth Astrology » Psychology

Picture of the Week: Astrology and the Locus of Control

Kathy — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:17:07 +0000

The photographer’s description of this image is as striking as the picture itself:

“Tom and myself rode down this hill in a ropey old 1950′s Leyland bus, typical of the Maltese bus fleet, but driven by the stunt driver for the bus scenes in ‘Speed’ where the bomb would go off if they slowed to less than 40mph! We were on high seats opposite the exit door and had to grip on whilst centripetal force took us and the bus closer to the outside wall. Tyres squealed on the hot tarmac and we were saved by some old dear in black who didn’t seem to need to hang on and dinged the bell as calmly as you like for the driver to stop and let her off.” (Source)

Life feels like this, sometimes, for each of us. Yet some people are more prone than others to careening through the days, whipped back and forth by forces they feel they can’t control. They complain of other people’s actions and influences on their lives: “He made me feel bad,” “She won’t let me go,” “They really have me tied down.”

In traditional psychology, this innate sense of where control lies in one’s life is referred to as the locus of control. In astrology — namely in Huber astrology — we can determine where a chart native’s locus of control lies in different areas of life by examining the dynamic calculations: a series of negative and positive numbers whose values reflect the strength of various mode and element combinations within the chart, based on planet, sign and house placements.

For example, someone with dynamic calculations of +33 mutable and +14 earth will end up with a “build-up” of +47 in Virgo energy (Virgo being the mutable earth sign). This means, in a nutshell, that the person tends to assume that Virgo-type control over life exists externally, out in the world, not within her own domain. So though she may have several planets in Virgo, she may feel their obligation, responsibility and critical analysis being imposed on her from others rather than from within herself.

Similarly, someone with dynamic calculations of -18 fixed and +10 water will end up with a “cut-down” of -8 in Scorpio (fixed water) energy. The person’s sense of emotional depth, intensity and control will lie more within himself than without; he is more likely to acknowledge that his strong feelings are generated internally rather than to blame someone else, or some external circumstance, for them.

This basic knowledge of dynamic calculations, alongside the psychological concept of locus of control, can be enormously helpful for clients who feel they are careening down a mountainside in a runaway bus with a crazy driver and a bomb on board. The astrologer may be the wise woman in black, calmly ringing the bell, telling the client it’s okay to get off, to see what it’s like to descend calmly and quietly on his own two feet.

Image: Harry Willis

The Wilderness in the Horoscope — Part 2

Kathy — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:05:58 +0000

In a recent post I asserted that there is no clear archetype of nature in the horoscope. I want to take that back, kind of. There are actually several symbols that could be different faces of the nature archetype — for example Mars’s wild instinct and Venus’s sensuousness and the abundance of Jupiter — but I’m going to go out on a limb (ha!) and call out the least “wild” of all archetypes as the horoscope’s fullest embodiment of nature.

Saturn.

In western astrology, Saturn is so often associated with doubt, fear and loathing, but every archetype has its light and shadow, and those associations are really, in my view, just potent bastardizations of Saturn’s good side. For, from the Huber perspective, Saturn is the matrix, the ground, the wellspring of security beneath our feet — the mother, even. (Before you take up arms against the idea of Saturn being the mother, let me assure you I’ll post about that soon enough.)

While Saturn may not imply abundance the way Jupiter does, it is the embodiment of the physical world — the roots, the trunk, the spreading-out of leaves, the slow and steady growth, a sort of integrative ability: the drive to take things into oneself — sun, rain, soil — and to distribute them according to need, in order create a productive system that is greater than the sum of its parts: a tree, a frog, an internally balanced ecosystem, a cohesive and secure family.

Saturn also embodies the arduous, enduring path toward that creation, and the patience of time spooling through the cycles of life, the inevitability of what follows: spring, summer, autumn, winter; pregnancy, birth, growth, death; inspiration, thought, action, results. It is not impetuous or unpredictable, except on the longest of timelines — who but the Divine could have foreseen that butterflies, for instance, would emerge from the Big Bang? — rather, like nature, Saturn is evolutionary, making incremental changes that are rooted in the seeds that have already been sown.

Saturn is, then, the keeper of the gate, the guardian of the rules of how a process must unfold. And though we tend — in our planned and organized society — to associate wilderness with chaos, the reality is that the wilderness depends on rules, on systems, on order for its very survival. If summer did not follow spring, if flowers did not condense into berries, if forest fires did not provide the raw material for regrowth, the wilderness would truly be chaos, and desolate. But humans’ first problem with Saturn is that, in our hands, within the confines of our small egos, Saturn wants to control the rules, the unfolding, of what Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls the Life/Death/Life Nature. We want to decide when it’s time for something to end: a relationship, a project, a life.

If we are conscious and humble and sincere in our motives, we might get that chance. If we are not, Saturn will render our endings for us, through crisis, ugliness and fear. And so Saturn is also the reaper, the symbol of the eventual unfolding, in due time, of what is sown. And here, again, we resist because the rest of the Saturn cycle has been reassuring, safety-making, connective and secure. We get used to the activity of sowing and tending whatever it is we are sowing and tending — a seed, a project, a relationship — forgetting that the seeds we are planting will eventually blossom and fruit with whatever pulse of energy we have poured into them. And when the fruit is ready to be transformed, we buck back. We want to hold the ripe, juicy fruit in our hands forever. But we can’t. It must become food, or it must shrivel and die.

This happens in nature all the time — both the nature without and the nature within. Internally, the transformation process is the ultimate test of authenticity and survival. Saturn seems to trouble us because we don’t want change and in its matrix we believe we will find the safety of changelessness. But we won’t. Because for as much as we astrologers associate Saturn with retrenchment and contraction, it is more about the inevitability of evolution. And if we retrench in the face of inevitability — if we embrace fear instead of the slow tectonic shifts of life’s seasons — then nature, Saturn, will find a way to crowbar us out of the ground beneath our feet. She will throw us into the wilds to find our own deep path toward survival.

Photo credit: Micky

Astrology, Past Lives and the Present Moment

Kathy — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 20:27:39 +0000

Most books on karma and reincarnation in western astrology look to the natal chart for clues about what baggage we lugged into our present journey on earth.

In the natal chart, as many astrologers have pointed out, the Moon’s North Node signals a karmic calling in this life: what the native is here to accomplish. It’s normally not an easy task (why would we be sent here to live out an easy life?). But while the North Node is the lodestar, it is not the whole journey. For that, astrological psychology pioneers Bruno and Louise Huber have developed a different tool: an entirely new chart covering the whole sweeping scope of past lives. It’s called the Moon Node chart.

(For the astrologers in the audience, the chart is created by exchanging the sign placements of the North Node and the Ascendant, making every house 30 degrees and reversing the direction of the zodiac wheel. See the examples of Carl Jung’s nodal and natal charts below.)

In keeping with the Hubers’ rigorous psycho-spiritual development model, the Moon Node chart does not exist for the ego’s purpose of finding out whether we were Cleopatra or Genghis Khan in a previous life. Instead, its purpose is to understand the present through the lens of the past in order to transform current problems — so we can better fulfill our karmic destiny in this lifetime. The Moon Node chart helps with that process by providing not which job titles we held in former lives but, more importantly, information about the kinds of activities, habits and relationship dynamics we have engaged in over the millennia. This information indicates the deep ruts we’ve dug ourselves into, from which we must now emerge in order to evolve.

The Moon Node chart integrates the idea of karma with the Jungian concept of psychic compensation, by which our psyche creates mirror images of our thoughts, feelings and habits in order to balance out our behavior. For example, a person who spent a former life manipulating and cheating others (a behavior that could be identified in the Moon Node chart) may, in this lifetime, find himself repeatedly playing the patsy to other nefarious folk. Similarly, someone who was formerly a slave may now find herself faced with great power over the lives of others. This “compensatory karma,” as I like to call it, is meant to lift the native out of the instinctive recycling of old energies and toward the compass-point of the present moment, the call of the current life.

In my view, it almost doesn’t matter whether you believe in reincarnation or not. The Hubers cast the Moon Node chart through this lens, and it is a very useful lens, not least because it gives us strong archetypal images on which to hang our self-understanding and self-development. But even if you cannot grasp the idea of past lives, it is clear that each of us comes into the world with a certain temperament, with propensities toward particular behaviors and with compulsions to habits or feelings whose roots we just don’t understand; and even contemporary psychotherapy cannot explain them all.

The Hubers, in their book Moon-Node Astrology, also provide a list of “archetypal stimulus words” — words like nomad, artist, merchant, thief, snob, matrimony, dictator, celebrity, inquisition, cardinal’s hat, abbess, isolation and many, many more — that can help chart natives intuitively tap into their past life dynamics with the aid of their Moon Node chart. Connecting with the individually relevant images may be the beginning of a journey back through time that allows each of us to come to terms with the past — however we perceive that term — so we may move forward into the present moment to fulfill our purpose in the now.

Image: qthomasbower

The Wilderness in the Horoscope — Part 1

Kathy — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 23:37:39 +0000

This question has come up, in various forms, during several horoscope readings lately: What is my relationship to the environment? – meaning the natural environment, nature, wildness, wilderness.

I suppose the question is becoming more and more urgent as environmental degradation seeps more deeply and more intractably into our lives — and as people of certain stripes reach ever more desperately for connection to the earth, or to our inner wilds. But it’s a difficult question, not only because there’s no clear archetype of nature herself in the horoscope but because what the horoscope does tell us about nature seems, in my view, to jive with a more imperialist view of humanity’s relationship with the trees and the mountains and the rivers.

What I mean is that my instinctive response to the question is to look at astrological implications of what the chart native can “get” from the natural world. For example, the other day, an avid dog lover with Jupiter in Taurus in the 5th house put the question to me in her own way, and my gut reaction was, “You could probably make a good amount of money breeding dogs.” Besides being a wholly inadequate response, the specific example implies a view that nature is there for our benefit — and that is not my client’s perspective (or mine) at all.

So the question becomes not only how to let go of my own unexpected imperialist view but also, then, to answer a question with a question: What is your intention, or desire, or need with nature? What are you thinking, feeling, or longing for, that seems as yet out of reach? The UK’s Atmosphere, Climate & Environment Information Programme has a wonderful summary of differing perspectives on nature here, describing four basic human attitudes toward the wild:

Stewardship, which holds that humans are part of and must care for the environment.
Imperialism, which holds that humans and nature are separate, and that humans have an inherent right to control nature.
Romanticism, which holds that nature is sacred, akin to God, and must be left alone to its wildness.
Utilitarianism or hedonism, which holds that the purpose of nature is to provide pleasure, comfort and usefulness to humans.

Each of these perspectives will have astrological corollaries through which we can understand more deeply the client’s impulse around nature. However, like any relationship, we cannot look to just one element of the chart to say, “Oh! You’re a hedonist! You want food from that river.” For example, a steward will be resource-conscious while also valuing mutuality. Perhaps she has a strong Venus, a horizontal aspect structure and several planets along the 2/8 axis. An imperialist may have more dominant-submissive features, such as a strong vertical orientation, an intense Pluto and several oppositions. A romantic might be watery and 12th house-oriented, whereas a hedonist may be earthier with a dominant Jupiter.

Then again, maybe not. Because again, like any relationship, the answer will never be as straightforward as a single archetype or element (which, after all, is not a simple thing in and of itself anyway). While we might have overriding tendencies in any relationship — to seek attention, to create stability, to exchange ideas, to control — none of us is exclusively a monolithic impulse. We want all of these things, from each other and from nature, in differing proportions in different relationships at different times in our lives.

And so asking an astrologer, “What is my relationship to the environment?” is a bit like asking her, “What is my relationship with people?” or “with money?” or “with work?” Relationships comprise the whole of the chart; they are a primary expression of Psyche; they engage every intricacy of our brains, our bodies, our souls, so that it is a question worthy of a whole session, or more, to inquire about the wilderness.

And that’s not even considering the wilderness within.

Picture of the Week: Scott Thiessen

Picture of the Week: I Heart Boys and Girls

Kathy — Tue, 26 May 2009 23:51:19 +0000

Funny, after what seems to be a lifetime of being female-oriented — going to a women’s college, working in lots of women-owned and women-dominated businesses (including at a women’s PAC), being generally very pro-female and pro-feminist — boys seem to be springing up everywhere in my life these days. I blame Jung and the tension of opposites.

I knew my first child was going to be a boy, and I was right (call it intuition if you want), but I was 99% sure my second child — the one still twisting and gestating in my belly — would be a girl.

Nope. Bubbaloo, as he’s been dubbed till he emerges, is full-on boy as well. Two sons!? I never really considered the possibility that I would be the only family member without a Y. Or, on a more positive note, with a very fine double-dose of X.

And then there’s this freelance work I’m doing, writing grant proposals for a boys’ mentoring program. I’ve been engrossed in distressing research about how the school system is stacked against boy energy; how boys receive messages that set up a struggle between traditional masculinity and contemporary ideals; how, despite appearances, boys’ self-esteem is actually quite fragile; and so on.

The knee-jerk part of me wants to say, Oh, waaah. Get over it. Let me tell you about being female. But the therapist, the mother, the wife and — yes — the feminist in me shush the reactionary, not just with concern for the boys and men I know and love but also with increasingly clear glimpses of how very, very important it is for women that men, too, are deeply understood and valued. Not valued for their traditional power/control/management roles but for their natural, wild, authentic maleness.

And, while we’re at it, how very important that women can claim and integrate traditionally masculine features and that men can claim and integrate traditionally feminine features.

One of the traditional elements of maturing in our society — the rite of passage — has largely been lost to both genders. Oh, the trappings are still there among some sub-populations: confirmation, debutante balls, fraternity hazings. But none that I know of (and admittedly I don’t know them all) carries the deep drumbeat of the initiation process that characterizes a traditional rite of passage: the conscious, ritualized separation from the former, more childish self; the dreamlike hang-time in liminal space; the sense of accomplishing feats of physical and mental survival; the deliberate opening to and cultivation of adult spiritual wisdom; the reincorporation, as an adult, into the society where one was once a child.

In astrological terms, the rite of passage is/was a sort of “graduation” from unconscious, undifferentiated Mars/Venus energy into a firmer grasp of gender energies on a more subtle, conscious, individual level — from Mars to Sun (mental will and awareness) and from Venus to Saturn (physical security and awareness). In other words, it is the movement from the communal energy of the lower half of the chart to the individuated energy of the upper half through the fires of the most fundamental questions of identity: What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? With luck, depth and wise guidance, the initiate may even glimpse Pluto and Uranus energy during this process.

When a boy or girl can claim their gender birthright, not as prescribed behaviors like flirting or competing or giggling or dominating, but as unique, self-aware expressions of their individual mix of gender — XX, XY or some lovely soup of the spectrum in-between — then a rite of passage has taken place. We move away from stereotyped gender roles and into the embrace of all possibilities within, able to move in and out of stereotypical maleness, femaleness and gender-neutrality with much more ease, assurance and spiritual wisdom than we did as children.

And we become able, as it seems too few do in contemporary life, to turn around to the generation that follows, to become mentors and guides to the boys and girls behind us, who still struggle to understand what it means to be a boy or a girl or a man or a woman — or anything else, for that matter — in today’s society. The astrological archetypes are not the only container for these energies, for this process, but they are vivid and tangible ones that can be useful guides along the way.

Can you identify a rite of passage in your life? Was it intentional or not? How did you grow through it? What did you sacrifice and what did you gain? Who guided you? What archetypal energies — masculine, feminine or anything else — were important in that journey?

Image: John Paul Bosbolo

Picture of the Week: Light and Shadow

Kathy — Wed, 20 May 2009 18:25:16 +0000

Most of the time, when I look at the picture of the week, I see right away the astrological archetype with which the image aligns.

My first instinct with this one was Saturn: the organization, the predictability, the safety of the grid-like pattern. But then I thought: No, Uranus: energy, electricity. Or Mercury: thousands of little connections all bringing energy to an undefined, in-between space.

All of these archetypes are true to the image in their own way but they don’t really get to the core of it for me. What is most striking about this photo, in my view, is the stark, bright, white light against the utter blackness: the striking oppositeness come together. Secondarily (or perhaps primarily, depending on the viewer), the grid pattern kind of couches or embraces a cross, which in the Christian tradition is the symbol of light penetrating dark.

But what is light penetrating dark in terms of astrology? I don’t think I can choose a single planet or sign to reflect that idea, for light and dark are such basic archetypal energies that undergird and run through all of life, through all the energies we carry within us: Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Sagittarius, Cancer — each of these and every other astrological energy carries its own brand of light and dark into embodiment, into the life of the person who carries that energy.

For instance, Venus is the goddess of love and beauty and, as such, represents merging relationship, sensuality, art and luscious enjoyment of life. But she can also be desperate and demanding, vain and superficial. These are two sides of the same coin, the light and the shadow of a single archetypal energy that lives in all of us.

There are others: Mercury’s quick wit, light laughter and adaptability is shadowed by detachment, fickleness and nit-picky-ness; Jupiter’s wisdom, perspective and generosity may be darkened by arrogance, excess and sloth.

When we accept, embody or live out only one side of an archetype, denying the other side’s potential within us, we run into trouble. This is the condition first identified by Sigmund Freud as projection and cast into mythic terms by Carl Jung as shadow.

Western astrologers have long identified shadow with the seventh house (the house of relationship), suggesting that we draw people to us who have the qualities we are not yet ready to accept in ourselves and integrate into our consciousness.

But we can experience shadow in any house of the horoscope, for example if we have a strong seventh house and little in its opposite house, the first, we may identify more completely with others than with ourselves, making the self into shadow material: fear of being alone, denial of one’s own worth, self-effacement or self-abnegation or self-mutilation, to go to the extreme. If our ninth house is dominant over the third, we may find ourselves in an ivory tower, alienated from community, and thus critical of people who have strong local connections and networks. And so forth.

This is all shadow material. Light penetrates shadow through the channel of consciousness, of becoming aware of where your shadows lie, where they’re sourced, how they’re triggered, how they grow.

Consciousness, in turn, is cultivated by self-reflection, self-honesty and ventures into the darkness, to discover and retrieve and reclaim what is there. It can be done, to some extent, on one’s own, but is more often effective with a faithful guide, a Virgil to one’s Dante or a Gandalf to one’s Frodo. Such guides can bring the wisdom, insight, faith, humbleness and even humor we need to believe in our own survival through the dark shadows of our own psyche. They can help us find our own light.

Image: Drake Guan

Picture of the Week: Mars on the Y Chromosome

Kathy — Tue, 12 May 2009 23:19:33 +0000

This picture is appropriate in that I’m now reading The Wonder of Boys by Michael Gurian in an effort to better understand the burgeoning boy in my life.

Psychology and sociology have conspired in recent decades to promote the belief that temperament and personality are all nurture, no nature. But as most parents will tell you (and as researchers have finally begun to admit), kids come out with their own distinct natures — a portion of which are clearly gender-specific.

Though he is careful to allow for each person’s individuality, Gurian’s book describes the ways testosterone, fetal brain development and other biochemical processes drive the traits we’ve come to identify as “typically” male: physicality, competitiveness, task-orientation, skill-building, independence-seeking and so forth. As someone who has historically experienced competition as anxiety- and shame-producing, this sentence particularly struck me: “Competition, for boys, is a form of nurturing behavior.” (p. 29)

I read the sentence to my husband who, as my mind was still reeling, casually remarked that he understood it instinctively. I had to start reshuffling my own neurons, start accepting the idea that the teasing element to my husband’s and son’s relationship might be, in fact, not a form of put-down or rivalry but, instead, a display of deep affection. How strange, I thought.

Not surprisingly, these “typically male” characteristics are part and parcel of the Mars archetype. Mars is the rawest expression of masculinity in the horoscope chart; it gets refined and strengthened as it goes “up the ladder” to solar consciousness and, then, transformative Plutonian will (this structure is per the Huber schema). But at the instinctive level, we can truly feel the testosterone pumping through, the competitiveness and the physicality and the drive to build skills, the urge to perform and succeed.

In my son’s chart, Mars is in Taurus in the 9th house. He learns well through large-muscle movement, through experiences that engage his mind in whole-body knowing. At three, he’s interested in reading and writing, but sitting in a chair and going over symbols and sounds won’t do for him the way it did for me. He is much better with interactivity, with word games that challenge him to build new skills, with learning new words and trying them out in a sentence, with connecting pictures with letters through books or television shows. (He is currently obsessed with PBS’s Word World, which makes letters into pictures of the things they represent.)

He also needs to move in a way I’ve never experienced: If he doesn’t ride his bike or scooter, kick a soccer ball, hit a baseball or run for several hours each day, he is restless and grumpy all night.

My Mars, on the other hand, is in Aquarius in the 6th house — a very different orientation. My body has always seemed, somewhat, like an appendage to my mind; give me an idea and I’ll chew on it and chew on it and chew on it until it’s spent. If there’s time later and I’m inspired, I might go for a stroll around the neighborhood. My Mars gets pumped by exploring and analyzing ideas, especially if I can organize them into a thought system. That’s why astrology works so well for me as a discipline. Whereas other tasks might bore me, I am continually absorbed by astrology, working to increase my knowledge and skills; it gives me energy rather than depleting it. I want to distinguish myself and be the best I can be in this field.

Sports? Meh, I prefer watching instead.

Take a look at the Mars in your chart. What sign and house is it in? Do you feel the energy pumping through you in the ways suggested by the sign and house? How so?

Photo: Lochnagarth

What It Takes to Be an Astrologer

Kathy — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:33:21 +0000

A reader e-mailed this week asking my opinion on what it takes to become an astrological counselor. He’s been studying astrology for years and will attend the ISAR conference in Chicago this August. He didn’t specify what kind of astrology he’s interested in — though I have to assume that, since he contacted me, he must have some interest in the psychological.

Anyway, here’s an adapted and expanded version of what I told him — what I think are the essential qualities of the serious psychological astrologer:

1) A psychological outlook. You need to understand not just how astrology works but also how human beings work. The horoscope is a map of the psyche but it’s not the psyche. You have to be able to understand how someone’s horoscope plays out in everyday life — in relationships, in work, in ambition, in feelings and so forth — and, in turn, how their psychology and subsequent experiences get shaped around those things. The horoscope is a starting point for assessing problems and laying out one’s path. It’s not the final word.

2) An archetypal outlook. Astrology is an archetypal symbol system. How well we read the symbols depends, in my view, on our level of comfort with archetype. You can memorize key words for each planet and sign all you want, but to understand the psychology of a person deeply through an astrological lens, you need to be able get inside each archetype, get the feel of it, truly inhabit it. Otherwise you’re relying too much on key words and not enough on true knowing, which comes with experience. The Huber school, which I’ve studied with for years, describes it as a Mercurial (key word) approach versus a Jupiterian (sensory, experiential) approach.

3) A cyclical outlook. Astrology occurs in the vortex of time, which is not linear but rather cyclical. In fact, all psychology occurs this way; it is just that astrology sheds a brighter light on the cycles of time than does traditional psychology. You don’t need to sacrifice your daily sense of life’s linear nature — that is, in a sense, necessary to our sanity — but you do need to be able to overlay that sense with an acceptance that events and patterns frequently loop back on one another, augment new threads that weave in from the future and past, spool out in muscly but invisible waves toward other people, other moments. If you can live comfortable with this idea, astrology will make a lot more sense. And if you can articulate it to your clients through the lens of their charts, you will crack open their lives in ways both pragmatic and profound.

4) Counseling or therapy skills. This goes hand in hand with #1. It’s important to be able to assess fairly quickly where people are in terms of self-awareness and life situation when they come for a reading and then to use that information to gear the reading appropriately. If you’re so far ahead (or behind) of where someone’s consciousness is, the reading will be of little use to them. Also, there are a lot of tools and techniques therapists use that help clients heal and grow. These are extremely useful for an astrological counselor. In fact, I’d be reluctant to go to an astrologer that hadn’t been trained in counseling or therapy skills.

Here’s a final thought I didn’t include in my private response to the reader because it came up for me afterwards, in the context of another article I’m writing. I think one of the counseling/therapy skills that’s critically important for an astrologer is the clarity and capacity to bring a true “I-Thou” perspective to the consulting room — that is, to maintain no expectations about who the client is. It is an extraordinarily difficult task for the astrologer, since we have the client’s chart right in front of us — we are able to look at it and say, “Oh! Very earthy person coming today at 3:00.” or “Probably a big dreamer type who just called.” If we can prepare for the reading by assessing the chart, and then leave any expectations at the door so the client has the chance to tell his story, I think the client is better served. And the bonus is, the astrologer then has more opportunity to learn how the chart works in individual lives. Win-win.

What about you? What do you think it takes to be a good astrologer? If you’re an astrologer, what makes you successful? If you’ve been to an astrologer, what stands out about him or her?

Image: zeevveez

Age Point, Low Point and Birthing the New Self

Kathy — Fri, 01 May 2009 20:10:01 +0000

Right around our son’s second birthday, many more experienced parents seemed to delight in warning us about the “Terrible Twos.” Our usual response was to smile quietly and ask them not to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy by repeating the phrase within earshot of the boy. I felt rather self-righteous when we sailed through that year with few difficulties.

Then came three. Three and a half, to be precise.

We already knew the Dragon had a pretty sensitive temperament, but we thought we’d gotten through the worst of separation anxiety, emotional intensity and knee-jerk defiance (at least until adolescence). But three and a half brought new highs and lows to his personality that we had not seen before. I recalled several older moms of sensitive kids telling me that 3 1/2 to 4 years old was the most intense time for their children.

Astrologically, this now makes sense to me. Through years of research, Bruno and Louise Huber developed a mechanism called the Age Point that acts much like the hour hand of a clock: It starts at the horoscope chart’s Ascendant at the moment of birth, sweeping across the circle counterclockwise at a rate of one house every six years.* At three years and eight months old, everyone’s Age Point hits a place — also discovered through the Hubers’ detailed research — called the Low Point of the first house.

Unlike the house cusp, when we tend to be bursting out all over, the 12 Low Points of the chart are, at best, times of greater introspection and solitude in our lives. We can learn much about ourselves during these times by cloistering, meditating, journaling, doing therapy and taking part in any other kind of work that engages our interior lives with energy and grace. It is preparation for the next phase, gestation of the new self. At worst, Low Point periods are frustrating and isolating, bringing the sense that no one sees us or understands us, that none of our projects or ambitions are working out, that we are profoundly alone, separated from others.

Like much in astrology, the difference in experience of the Low Point derives from the person’s natural inclinations and his or her support (or lack thereof) from the environment. If you are naturally an introspective or solitude-seeking person, the Low Point might come as a bit of relief to you because the world will give you space to process, in solitude, the changes that the world now demands of you. But if you are normally more outgoing, ambitious and action-oriented, the Low Point will likely be a time of incredible frustration. Even those who feel treated more gently by the Low Point period, however, will still come up against walls that require great wisdom to scale.

I liken the Low Point to a fetus getting too big for the womb. He knows he must find a way out, must make the move to birth himself, but the familiar is so comforting that he resists. He resists and resists, curling tightly inside, not wanting to come out, enjoying the dark, damp, pink softness he’s come to know as home — as his house. The new world — the next house — is still unknown and therefore frightening. He doesn’t want to learn all he needs to know to get there, doesn’t want to do the work. But the time comes when he simply must. Through some mysterious alchemy, contractions begin and the work of transition is underway. This marks the mutable zone of the house, when new learning and movement and pushing begin to direct us toward a new phase of life.

The Low Point comes at the same ages for each person in life. How you experience yours will depend not only on your natural temperament and the environment you’re in but also on which zodiac sign the Age Point is in, whether it’s making any significant aspects to natal planets and other factors as well. Do you remember times of particular difficulty moving forward, or being heard, during these periods of your life?

3 1/2 to 4 years old
9 1/2 to 10 years old
15 1/2 to 16 years old
21 1/2 to 22 years old
27 1/2 to 28 years old
33 1/2 to 34 years old
39 1/2 to 40 years old
45 1/2 to 46 years old
51 1/2 to 52 years old
57 1/2 to 58 years old
63 1/2 to 64 years old
69 1/2 to 70 years old
75 1/2 to 76 years old

These will, of course, not be the only difficult times of life — difficulty is caused by things other than Low Point experiences. But it can be helpful to note whether hard times have coincided with any Low Point periods and to check your temperament and environment for support or further obstacles. It can also be helpful knowledge for negotiating relationships, whether you or the other is the one dealing with Low Point angst.

As a mom, I can only do my best to be aware, empathize, give our son language and awareness, and hope we’re providing the support and resources he needs to get through his first Low Point period (especially since his father and I are going through our Low Points during the same year!). And I’m looking forward to seeing what new self he is busy birthing for his next phase of life.

—

* For the astrologers in the audience, we are talking Koch houses here.

Image: Or Hiltch

The Horoscope Chart as a Map Back

Kathy — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 23:45:28 +0000

A friend sent me a lovely, aching poem this morning. “In Knowledge of Young Boys” by Toi Derricotte reads, in part,

i knew you before you had a mother,
when you were newtlike, swimming
… when your connections
belonged only to yourself,
when you had no history
to hook on to,
barnacle …
i knew you when you were all
eyes and a cocktail,
blank as the sky of a mind,
a root, neither ground nor placental;
not yet
red with the cut nor astonished
by pain, one terrible eye
open in the center of your head
to night, turning

People often ask me whether a birth time is legitimate for astrological purposes if labor has been induced, or the baby was born by C-section, or a child has come prematurely. “Of course,” I tell them. “The birth time is the birth time.” It marks the primordial energetic imprint of the universe on the inhaling, exhaling, screaming, shocked, squishy little being when it emerges from the newty swamp of the womb onto the dry horizon of earth.

Before that instant, the instant of imprint, the child is without a chart, without its own native markings bestowed by the cosmos. It is utterly unto itself, with “connections [belonging] only to yourself,” with “no history to hook onto, barnacle … blank as the sky of a mind, a root, neither ground nor placental.” It is the moment of breakage, when the baby separates from the mother’s body, when the umbilicus is severed, that the child has a chart — which is to say that, at that instant, the child begins, at first unwittingly and then with more intention, to craft connections and hooks and roots of its own.

These connections and hooks and roots are embedded in the horoscope chart. They are described by the etchings of aspect lines and the archetypal astro-glyphs that dot the chart like cuneiform: the bones that give shape to the life. And like bones, such natural tendencies — to love exuberantly, perhaps, or to think deeply or to revel in the pleasure of the senses — can be broken, sprained or strained; can hurt for no obvious reason, can become lame or numb or awkward, can burn. They can, as Derricotte writes, become

red with the cut [or] astonished
by pain, one terrible eye
open in the center of your head
to night, turning

When the astonishment of pain — physical or otherwise — takes the child, the youth, the grown-up away from its natural state, fears and complexes and dysfunctions result; shadow settles in. We live this way for a while, often for a long time. We feel the ways that poorly-tended pain gives birth to itself, over and over and over and over, until we forget, maybe, how it is to feel good, to feel whole and natural and vibrant. Maybe this forgetfulness pervades the whole life. Maybe it is isolated, confined to just one area or just one era of the life.

Whenever and however pain happens, repair and restoration are necessary for healing which, at its root, means wholeness. Instead of repair and restoration, though, so many of us adapt to the pain: We limp, or sit differently, or give parts of ourselves away. We begin to forget who we are, what the healthy and whole expression of our natural connections and hooks and roots really looks like, really feels like. We self-medicate or complain a lot or take bold risks or leave our relationships or quit our jobs to “find ourselves.” This is hard work in service of pain.

The horoscope chart is not the end word in healing and wholeness. In fact, it is to that stillpoint at the center of the chart that all roads finally, lovingly, lead. But some pain is so profound that it’s taken us off the road completely, placed blinders over our eyes and cotton in our ears, made it crushingly difficult to find the way back. The chart is like a map — not back to the womb, when we had no history to hook onto, barnacle, but back to our aboriginal selves, to integrate the astonishment of pain with the wholeness of who we were in that first moment of squishy aliveness.