What is Depth Astrology? Click here to learn more.
|
 Ask a friend to name an animal commonly depicted in literature, myth and culture, and the answer isn’t likely to be “frog.” But from the ancient Egyptian goddess Heket to The Frog Prince to Michigan J. Frog, the croaking amphibians have populated the cultural imagination for thousands of years.
In ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, the frog was associated with fertility, probably in part because the animals appeared in droves following the annual flooding of the Nile, whose silt deposits fertilized the Egyptian soil. In Asia, frogs are harbingers of fortune and luck, as they are in Scotland: “Households often keep stone frogs in their gardens and they are often given as house warming presents.” (Source) And in the Celtic Druidic tradition:
[The frog] unites the elements of water and earth, bringing joy, delight and healing in its singing and hopping … The frog possesses an extremely sensitive skin, considered magical by shamans. A companion of the rain spirits, the frog can help you develop sensitivity to others, to healing and to sound through your skin and your whole body and aura. (Source)
This symbolic sensitivity actually shows up on a scientific level as frogs are a documented sentinel, or indicator, species. In recent years, deformities in frogs have been noted as an early indicator of chemical farm pollution impacting local ecosystems. (Source) As well, in nature, frogs occupy the space between water and land, much as Heket represents the final stages of childbirth, when the baby emerges from the amniotic fluid to come live on the drier earth.
The composition of the photo above (wittingly? unwittingly?) reveals this sensitive in-the-margins space that frogs occupy both in the scientific research and in the cultural imagination: The stone sculpture of the frog sits at the shoreline between foliage and bark, and its skin is painted both red and blue, as if it could flux back and forth between two innate ways of being. (In Huber astrology, different colors represent different energies: red squares and oppositions are active; blue sextiles and trines are restful.)
The astrological archetype that first jumps to mind when I think about these characteristics of the frog is Mercury: it is light, flexible, sensitive, magical; it traverses the margins between defined worlds. But Mercury is a bit “drier” than a frog, airier and more detached than water and earth would suggest. So I want to say the frog, perhaps, is Mercury in a water sign (Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces) or, under the right conditions, in an earth sign (Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn). Or perhaps it is Mercury coupled with Virgo or the Moon or maybe even Jupiter: a planet that brings it a waterier, earthier sensibility, that deepens its sensitivity in an intuitive and sensual way.
There is one more element in the photo above that deserves comment: the paint is peeling. The frog is obviously old and may be neglected or forgotten (or, on the other hand, intentionally left to the weather). Whatever the case, there is a whisper of Saturn here, of the slow decay that comes with time. In our culture, we tend to turn away from such things.
But the photo instead shows how, over time, the bravely sensitive — and patient — person exposes what is underneath, makes raw and available what is inside, perhaps to help others, perhaps to move closer authenticity, perhaps to become more fertile with the deepening of each passing year.
Photo: lisa_eglinton
This morning, as we do roughly every Monday or Tuesday, a friend and I got on the phone to discuss one dream each that we’d had over the weekend. Though this morning our respective dreams were quite different, they both had the same apocalyptic feeling that seems to be pervading the whole world lately.
In my astrologer’s mind, it was the feeling of Pluto moving into Capricorn:
- In my dream, I was with a group of friends in an outdoor mall where only one store was open and operating. We heard, and then saw, a huge, heavy military plane fly very low overhead. It looked like a stealth bomber. We watched as it slowly got lower and lower, skimming treetops and power lines, then finally crashed into the ground nearby.
- In my friend’s dream, she was with her teenage daughter on a hilltop in Los Angeles. The hill slowly gave way under their feet and came sliding down to the ground below. They were okay in the end, but the entire hill was just gone from underneath them.
Astrologers are fond of pointing out that, around the time Pluto was discovered in 1930, atomic bombs were developed and fascism and Nazism reared their heads — frightening metaphors for the kind of cataclysmic and totalitarian destruction that can be wrought by Plutonian power. Pluto breaks things down into their unseen parts, forces us to look at them and remixes them into new, unfamiliar and sometimes terrifying structures. Pluto is the life-death-rebirth cycle in all its imaginable forms.
A less truly frightening Plutonian metaphor of 1930 was the debut that year of the U.S. radio drama The Shadow – with actor Frank Readick, Jr. intoning the iconic introduction:
“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh! The Shadow knows…”
In Jungian terms, the shadow is psychological material that gains its power from the very fact that it is repressed. It’s usually repressed because it’s something we don’t want to admit about ourselves. The more we repress it, the bigger and more powerful it grows, creating projection situations where we can see it only outside of ourselves.
For example, did you ever despise someone for, say, her arrogance, only to be forced to admit that you’ve got a certain self-righteousness about you as well? Or have you ever been the President of a superpower who systematically shut down the freedoms of its own population while embarking on an international campaign for freedom in other countries? The larger and stronger the shadow grows, the greater power it has over you — precisely because you haven’t dared to look at it, to admit it exists, to confront it head-on. And the more you ignore it, the bigger ass-kicking is required to make you pay attention to it.
In the horoscope, any planet can contain shadow material, not just Pluto. But Pluto’s dynamic tends to be the archetypal shadow dynamic — the force of change through exposure of hidden powers — and its expression is generally large-scale and often scary. Yes, Pluto exists in each of our individual horoscope charts, but unless it’s touching a more personal planet in our chart, its effects tend to be wider-spread, more impersonal: across a generation, across a culture.
So we get situations like market “corrections” or terrorist attacks that force us (or should force us) to look at ourselves: Are we, as a culture, a bit too self-righteousness, say, or greedy, or giddy about imposing “freedom” on others without examining our own freedom complex? Are we really as free as we brag about being? As generous? As right?
When Pluto pulls the veil off our eyes, for example when it changes zodiac signs and highlights a different area of life anew, it can feel frightening in the extreme. The last 13 years of Pluto in Sagittarius have been marked by ubiquitous consumption, accelerating depletion of natural resources and idealism-cum-tyranny — the latter starting, I would argue, with the Taliban’s 1996 march across Afghanistan and reaching its climax with the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.
The weaknesses in the structures that have supported these trends are now emerging from the shadows. We are experiencing the breakdowns associated with dictating our ideals in foreign lands, getting drunk on oil fields and building castles on flimsy credit.
Pluto’s movement into Capricorn highlights the reality that the old code is slowly disintegrating. What might be more frightening than that — after all, many of us would like to see regime change here in the U.S. at least — is that we don’t yet know what will come to take its place. This not-knowing can whip up an atmosphere of crisis.
The word crisis comes from the Greek krinein, meaning “to separate.” Also derived from that root are the words criminal, decree, discern, discriminate, excrement and secret: All Plutonian words in that they imply shadowy, secret or hidden elements that need to be separated, sorted and reconnected in new ways — a process that almost always implies crisis of some kind. Separation of a relationship, a limb or an atom requires careful handling in order to reconnect it or remake it or recreate it productively instead of destructively. When separation and reconnection occur, there is always the possibility of something going horribly wrong.
Like powerful military jets crashing in a calm sky and sturdy green hillsides collapsing underfoot, it is hard to imagine such apparently solid structures as markets and governments and capitalism and democracy separating into component parts and being remade in a different form. It might even be frightening to think about this happening: What crisis would ensue if we were separated from our money? If familiar government agencies and commercial storefronts disintegrate and reassemble in some other form? If oil-based energy disappears completely?
But confronting the possibility of change, and admitting where we’ve gone wrong, and remaking those institutions in the spirit of integrity and solidity may bring us together in a way that only true crisis can. Frightening as it may seem to live in this in-between period, we may someday look back at this time and think, “How did we live through that?” and then, “I’m so glad we did!”
Comment below: Have you had dreams about cataclysmic destruction lately?
Photo credits: Stealth bomber, Rose shadow
Part Three of a Three-Part Series
Click for Part 1 and Part 2
Day 5: Jenny and I had coffee with friends in the morning, then headed out to Griffith Observatory for the afternoon. In retrospect, it was a fitting way to braid together the sensory indulgences and the intellectual intakes of the previous four days.
If you know something about astrology, you might associate an observatory with Jupiter (the great eye, the long view, the wide view) or Neptune (the boundlessness of space) or even the Sun (the shining core of our little circle of planets, our awareness, our self-understanding).
But what I saw was Saturn. Not Saturn in the traditional malefic way, the way of stripping you bare and paring you down. Saturn in the way that energy becomes matter and integrates and tells the story of deep time.
It started with the rattlesnake signs in the hillsides above the observatory: a warning of our mortality, of the instantaneous ability of forces beyond our control to swiftly and unequivocally define our time on earth. In the flash of a fang, poison mixes with blood, commutes to the brain and stops the body dead in its tracks.
Okay, so maybe that’s a little malefic. But it didn’t feel that way so much as injecting a little more somberness, a little more awareness, into our day. We didn’t turn back because of the sign, but our attention turned a bit from the hills, the Hollywood sign across the bright canyon, the little blue birds sailing in the foreground, and toward our feet on the ground, the fraying fabric there, the careful placement of each step.
After a few minutes of slow climbing, w e picked our way back down the trail and were confronted again with the dead: a sculpture featuring notable contributors to the long train of wisdom flowing out behind modern astronomers (left: Galileo and Copernicus). They were reminders that, with the proper application of energy, ambition and integrity, we could stretch ourselves out past the bounds of our body’s time here on earth. We can each leave a legacy in our own achievements. We can be the giants on whose shoulders future humans stand. I was reminded of the horoscope, the 4/10 axis, the long climb from the bottom of the hill to the summit, the process of coming from one’s ancestry and going toward one’s future.
Inside the hall, the historic building welcomed us with a giant pendulum that swung slowly, always aimed at True North, while the clock below it turned with the motion of the Earth. On one side was the Hall of the Eye; on the other was the Hall of the Sky. These exhibits house more traditional — more Saturnine, if you will — information on astronomy: navigation, telescopes, phases of the Moon and other such expected features. But plunk down a side staircase and you enter the building’s newer spheres, which debuted in 2004 after the observatory’s extended closure.
At the bottom of the stairs, you turn right to enter the “wormhole stairway,” really a simple channel taking you one more flight down into the basement exhibits. Jenny and I joked that the wormhole ought to have been graced with some more interesting features if they were going to bother with a name like that: spooky music or ghostly lights, perhaps. We opted to go straight, instead. And were glad we did.
B ecause by going straight, we entered the Cosmic Connection, a hallway featuring a simultaneously whimsical and profound timeline that traces the development of the universe from the Big Bang until today. Below the traditional horizontal layout of the unending march of years is pinned a long, sparkling river of more than 2,000 pieces of jewelry that look like stars, moons, comets and other astronomical ingredients. The pieces were contributed by a longtime donor and associate of the observatory, who had collected them over more than four decades. It was fun to walk the hallway and try to figure out from which era different bracelets, pendants and earrings hailed. Jenny and I called to each other: “Look at this hairclip!” “I want that necklace!”
But the jewelry, cool as it was, was really just a Venusian side note to the Cosmic Connection itself. The hallway curves — maybe like space, maybe like time — so that just a few feet in, I started to feel a little disoriented, a little overwhelmed. Large-scale photo-quality illustrations of the Big Bang and other cosmic developments reminded me both of own sense of smallness and of my intimate connection with every particle of dust floating by. Randomness and order converged. I could almost hear the grand symphony of the spheres tuning up, gathering in, pausing, breathless, before the conductor’s baton sliced downward, setting the great wheel of time in motion. I thought, How could anyone look at these photos and not believe in a god, or a goddess, or a marvelous dancing troupe of deities?
 Even though the Big Bang occurred 13.7 billion years ago, the Cosmic Connection made me feel like it’s right next door — like its long shimmering arms still reach around us, holding us, rippling through us, getting caught in our mortal webs, pushing us to grow upward and outward, while yet holding us to the bounds of its physical laws. Its motion is like the ripples of a pond where a rock has just been thrown: concentric undulations, moving out, and yet in, at the same time. Its long arms seem, to me, to reach back in time to gather up the detritus of our origins, then bring them forth to us in offering, asking us to repurpose the very material from which we came, so many billions of years ago, to put it to good use for the next step — outward? upward? inward? — on our long, curving journey through time.
Photo credits: jewelry, Big Bang
 Putting yoga and astrology together in one workshop or retreat seems, at first blush, a little like sitting an elephant down at a computer and saying, “See? Now do you get it?”
In other words: No. It’s not obvious at all. Yoga is all about the body, isn’t it? While astrology is, well, a little arcane and out-there, a kind of voodoo psychobabble — right? So wouldn’t a workshop that brings the two together be more like two classes running alongside each other?
You would think, but you’d be wrong.
At the core of both yoga and astrology is an understanding of how energy operates in our lives — the energy to express oneself, to establish security, to learn, relate, experience and love. Yoga understands that energy as gaining expression through the body, while astrology views the psyche as the central medium. But both disciplines have identified the same basic energies coursing through our lives.
As mind-body integration is becoming more accepted and energized throughout the west, yoga and astrology both are growing disciplines. So it seems a natural time to explore how the roots of these two powerful and ancient technologies are connected, and how they can twine together for the benefit of individuals and humanity as a whole.
This is the principle on which my Yoga & Astrology work is grounded. I hope this little story, and the explanation following, will further illuminate the way we work in our workshops and retreats. And I hope it will intrigue you enough to come to one of our upcoming Los Angeles workshops or even our week-long retreat in Taos this fall.
 The Story of Rapunzel
Originally told by the Brothers Grimm
After many years of barrenness, a poor couple was expecting a child, but they had little money for food. The pregnant wife craved radishes, which could only be gotten by the husband stealing them from the garden of the witch next door under cover of darkness. When the husband was finally caught, the witch demanded the unborn child in recompense. The frightened husband agreed.
After their child – a girl named Rapunzel – was born, the despondent couple brought her to the witch. When Rapunzel was 12 years old, the witch locked her in a tower with no doors and only one high window. Using Rapunzel’s long hair as a ladder, the witch brought food and drink to the tower. One day, a prince spied the witch climbing Rapunzel’s hair. He waited until night, then called to the girl and climbed her hair.
The prince visited nightly from then on, and soon the young couple was in love. By and by, they hatched a plan to free Rapunzel from the tower. But before they could carry it out, the witch discovered that Rapunzel was pregnant. Furious, the witch cut off Rapunzel’s hair and threw her from the tower. That night, the prince called to Rapunzel and, when her hair unfurled from the high window, he climbed it. He was astonished to see the witch’s face when she reached the top. She pushed him away from the window; he fell to the ground and was blinded by thorns when he landed.
Rapunzel, pregnant with twins, and the prince with gouged-out eyes, wandered separately in the wilderness for many years. One day, the prince heard Rapunzel singing near a well and approached, calling her name. They fell into each other’s arms, and their tears of joy restored the prince’s sight. He took Rapunzel and their children to the castle to live happily ever after.
Our Capricorn workshop last January began with this simple tale, which is rich with images and themes that evoke the Capricorn archetype. We then unpacked those themes, our eyes ever on Capricorn, to better understand the dynamics of the sign and how it might operate in our own lives. For example, we discussed the following themes, each of which is the sort of challenge a Capricorn person* might face:
- The poor couple had tried for many years to conceive a child but could not. They continued trying until finally their goal was within sight.
- The shortcut and dishonesty taken by the father to satisfy his wife’s temporary craving had disastrous results, hugely exacerbated by his fear and inability to stand up to the witch and protect his child.
- The witch, representing the opposite imbalance, became drastically overprotective of Rapunzel, locking her in a high tower and infantilizing her.
- Rapunzel was not allowed to touch her feet to the ground, to gain life experiences and build her own competence, survival instincts and independent selfhood.
- Rapunzel had to have tangible resources and a well-laid plan – aided by her own animus, or inner masculine – in order to reach the ground and begin experiencing life.
- But she also had to have the courage to overthrow her own limitations in the form of overprotectiveness, clinging to obligation, and so forth.
- Finally, she had to wander in the wilderness by herself. She could not again cling to another outer authority; she had to build her own inner resources by struggling on her own before coming back – more mature, more competent, freer – to the external partner.
 As we explored these insights, each person identified a goal they’d been trying to reach and examined possible instances of self-sabotage or rigidity and limitation. We discussed the importance of having a “strong spine” in order to stand up for oneself and to individuate, then did some muscle-testing to find out how strong we could physically resist simple toxins like sugar and caffeine. Muscle-testing was followed by a yoga set for spine strengthening which was, in turn, followed by another round of muscle-testing. Participants were amazed at how much more they could resist after a single session of spine-strengthening yoga!
To counter the inflexibility and outdated assumptions that can accompany a stance of strength, we then turned to consider flexibility. We discussed the roles played by the symbol of stone in the Rapunzel story and tried to identify some assumptions that had calcified each person’s ability to meet challenges and achieve goals. Yoga for flexibility followed this discussion, and then people were asked to return to their assumptions and try out how it felt to change them — no matter how outrageous the change!
The workshop concluded with a look at the last part of the Rapunzel story: the part where the main character is thrown out of the tower, pregnant with twins, to fend for herself in the wilderness. This crystallizes the Capricorn challenge of developing our inner authority so that we may choose strength and flexibility, community and individual, the straight path and deviations from it, with consciousness and self-possession. The workshop concluded with yoga for survival and vision, and a visualization that helped participants access that powerful and authoritative figure within themselves.
Each of our workshops operates on several levels like this, engaging body, mind, heart and imagination, and cross-pollinating story with physical activity, self-reflection, creative artwork, peer dialogue and more. Our Taos retreat this fall will also integrate visits to local sites such as Taos Indian Pueblo and the Rio Grande Gorge to see how the signs manifest in the landscape and human creations. It will cover the whole cycle of 12 signs in a six-day period — a challenge, to be sure, but one that you’ll come away from with profound insight and deeper self-knowledge.
I hope you’ll join us.
—
* And by “Capricorn person,” I don’t only mean people with Capricorn as their sun sign. Anyone whose chart contains strong Capricorn energy — which can appear in a number of different ways — would qualify as a “Capricorn person” in my estimation. And certainly all of us could stand to know about the dynamics surrounding goal achievement and individuation!
|
What People Say “Truly gifted astrologers are a rarity. Kathy Crabb is one such person. She is a brilliant, original thinker, an intuitive and empathic counselor and a superb workshop facilitator.”
Pam Tyler, Dip. API (1981), Dip. FAS (1979),
AFA Teacher Cert. (1978); Astrologer since 1977;
Co-founder of Astrological Psychology Institute (UK);
Author of Mercury: Anatomy of a Planet
Get Our Blog Updates Your Way!
contact lenses - Lens.com offers a huge online inventory of brand name contact lenses with reasonably priced prices. Services include online order and shipping straight to you.
|
Recent Comments