I don’t often get angry if I meet folks who find astrology incredulous, or even ridiculous. I find their worship of science and technology as the answer to everything faintly ludicrous, and am happy to agree to disagree about fundamental life views. I know my method makes sense, they know theirs does, we’re all happy. Science is a system which proposes to impose meaning on the random and chaotic. So does astrology. The mandate of astrology is that life has an underlying pattern we are trying to discover. So does science. Astrology declares that there is an underlying direction that can be discerned by understanding astrology’s laws. So does science, with its laws. Both are based on mathematical principles. Looked at through a slightly skewed mirror, astrology and science have a lot in common. 
What does make me angry is the building up and sacrificing of straw dogs. This is what the Republican party is so fond of doing, as when it made monsters of untruth out of Obama’s health care bill and then proceeded to cut it down over their self-generated false allegations. Astrology haters think they’re telling the truth, expounding the triumph of logic over superstition, of reason over belief. Someone who knows absolutely nothing about astrology will make proclamations about it, and then ridicule those falsities– the very thing that he is knocking down has nothing to do with astrology itself, as it is practiced. Mostly these people know only what they read in the newspapers, and are reacting against prediction, worshipers of free will who believe that every decision made in life has nothing but an egocentric origin, ignoring the myriad influences that form it. (It always strikes me that the public detractors tend to be people who have been able to skate on the surface of their lives. They’re usually successful people whose lives have arranged themselves very well, thank you, and have never bothered to look any further.)
These are the same people who would come out against religion, if only it were socially acceptable. (Sadly, astrology-bashing IS socially acceptable. See my piece on The New Backlash.) It is getting more socially acceptable, in this post-9/11 age. The new acceptable trend is to be belief-free, and to treat all those who believe in an overriding spiritual world view as loony at best and insane at worst. (This fanatic worship of the so-called ‘rational’ view can probably be blamed on Neptune’s transit through Aquarius (fixed air), but don’t tell them that. So can the phenomenon of religious extremism of any kind.)
This is a world where reality television regularly wins out over drama. Where intelligent cinema, unless it couches its message in mythology, is nearly non-existent. Where theatre without the distraction of singing and dancing struggles for an audience, and where the ordinary is preferred to the extraordinary. It’s safer that way. We would rather see our mundane selves endlessly reflected back to us, rather than be provoked or stimulated or urged or inspired towards something greater. Where is our “Citizen Kane?” Where is our “Death of a Salesman” or “Look Back in Anger?” These works take imagination, vision, and passion, all of which now seem to be in short supply. You can argue that all these things are now wrapped up in the technological revolution. I, for one, think the iPhone is a work of art. But we need more. We need context. We need meaning.
I think everyone has seen the above painting by William Blake. It’s called “The Ancient of Days,” an old name for god. Everyone assumes that this painting depicts some benevolent god of architecture, the creator as scientist. They’re wrong. This painting is of Blake’s god Urizon, part of his elaborate mythology, who forces uniformity and convention upon mankind. (Urizon’s enemy and counterpart is the god Los, the spirit of vision.) Take a good look at the piece. Blake is saying a lot about that compass in his hand. He had a name for those with no faith and no vision, who would not accept that there is anything in the world beyond which we can explain with facts and figures. He called these people, dismissively, “The Measurers.” (For more on Urizen, and Blake’s mythology, click here.)
Perhaps the thing that drives me the most crazy is when people say, “Oh, astrology always has an out—you’re not like your Sun sign because you have this rising, and the moon is in so and so…” Implying that we’re just busking our way through.
Um….yep. Complexity. That’s the point. The same people who dismiss Sun sign astrology because it is too simple and pat (and they have a point) then turn around and say astrology doesn’t work because you can make anything out of it…straw dogs indeed. As if we don’t have centuries worth of complex methods and rules and mathematical principles behind us, and we’re just making it up as we go. As if a human being is not a tangled knot of contradictions. I studied for decades before I ventured into becoming a professional astrologer. I wasn’t sure I was worthy of the craft. And now I have to sit and listen politely to clueless, uninformed idiots dismiss my art in public forums. (You know who you are, Mr. I Am Not An Aries…)
I used to get angry. I don’t anymore. Because over the years I have realized that, in general, introduction into any kind of serious metaphysical study is not based on logic or instinct or inspiration, it’s experiential. That’s what separates us, on the whole, from the measurers. Serious metaphysical study takes intellect as well as instinct, but all of us who practice it in any form have at some point had an initiation into alternative planes of influence and existence. It usually happens at some point early in our lives, and continues to develop. We make connections others are not equipped to make, because we see more, not less. Our scope is broader, wiser. We understand about correlations and correspondences, something that the measuring world has forgotten. We understand about the irrational and illogical connections between things.
Jung once said that men see objects and women see the relationship between objects. In that way, astrology, and by extension any metaphysical practice, is essentially feminine in its perspective. To learn it properly, you need to be still, to receive. Right there, it opens the door to dismissal in this patriarchal, testosterone-fueled culture. (Not male-bashing. I’m very fond of testosterone, in its right proportions.) Ancient cultures understood this better than we do–it’s something we’ve lost. An astrologer understands the unique correspondence between Saturn and iron, between Mars and knives, between Leo and the heart, between the number 8 and the caduceus. A measurer will not.
There is a reason why metaphysical practices, historically, have always been done in secret. It’s because of this need to be receptive, to turn our back on the ordinary. How can connections occur if we are continually being rattled by people who are always running around doing things, who don’t take time to just listen, to just be? Who measure their own lives in terms of what they have achieved, rather than what they understand? No wonder they never get it. Their conscious awareness has not evolved to embrace the fact that there are correlations occurring on a daily basis that we simply can not explain in a logical fashion.
When I was in my early twenties, I had a life-changing experience. It was my first Chiron square to itself, but I didn’t know that then. On a dull Sunday evening, I was suddenly overwhelmed by a strange feeling. I turned completely inward, as if my consciousness had turned itself inside out and I was no longer involved with what was around me. I sat down on the sofa in the darkening living room, and for two hours was overwhelmed by concern for a man I loved, who was half a world away. It was more than concern, I saw him and I felt him, felt what he was feeling, and I knew I was comforting him with my ‘presence.’ It was, for that time, as if we were one. He told me he was afraid. He told me he was leaving. I felt his uncertainty and his reluctance to leave. I felt his fear. I helped him to let go. Just as suddenly as I went into this state, hours later, I snapped out of it. I was relieved. What had I been thinking, all these morbid thoughts? Something made me look at the clock to note the time. The next day, I found out that he had died, at exactly the minute that I looked at that clock.
Take that, measurers.
This story is just one of millions that happen every day around the globe. These are the stories that don’t get told, because they are not ‘acceptable’ in our social milieu, and because the stories are so precious that no one who experiences them dares to expose them to the ridicule and dismissal of the dictators of the disconnected world view. But they happen, all the time. For most of us, these experiences confirm the fact that there is more to life, love, and consciousness than we understand right now. I doubt we ever will understand, because consciousness seems to expand in relation to our awareness of it–the more we know, the more there is to know. An experience like one this cannot help but send us down a different, often lonely and difficult, path. We become isolated, somehow banished from the norm.
The loneliness of metaphysical pursuit is not something that gets discussed much. Either we go it alone and in silence, or this experiential banishment forces us to turn our backs on the ‘real’ world and find an alternative world with like-minded others, others who also see through the cracks in the fabric of what is commonly known as everyday existence.
As the astrological community works itself up into a fuss over the upcoming cardinal T-square, let’s take a moment to think back and recall what it is that actually brought us to this particular path. Because that is the very thing that guides us, nourishes us and protects us, the knowledge that we are all, at core, deeply connected, not only to one another, but to the Earth itself and the energy that formed it. We don’t need to measure it. We just need to live it.
This month, last year, I was grieving about the treatment meted out to astrologers. Grieving about astrology not finding mainstream acceptance.
Then I read what you, and many other fine astrologers including Gavin Carruthers, Jeremy Neal, Nicholas Campion and Michael Lutin said about astrology. It helped heal me. I was especially healed by what Mr. Lutin said in this interview:
http://www.astrococktail.com/sunshineastrologer.html
Over the past year, I got to connect with astrology’s bright young stars like Chris Brennan and Nick Dagan Best. I see their competence, intelligence and integrity and it brings me peace.
Dear Dawn
this is a marvellous, profound, celebratory piece of work – supportive of all of us who know from living our lives deeply, and practicing our art with study, experience, sincerity and sensitivity, that we truly live in a unified cosmos where both mythos and logos have their place.
Next week, I am beginning a new phase on my main site, and would like to use this as my Guest piece. May I?
Anne,
Thank you. You’re very welcome to use this piece in any way you’d like.
I cried reading this…
thank you
Thank you, lotion. I cried writing it.
Wonderful post, Dawn. Thank you.
Hello, I have always been interested on some level with subjects like astrology for some time. Recent events seem to be driving me to actually seriously study it.
In any event, I read this blog post and had to chuckle, my best friend is a “measurer” and when I try to discuss the subject with him, his arguments almost read verbatim to what you have written above. LOL I sent the link to this post in an email just now, not sure if he will read it or not, but I hope he does, because it sums up my arguments perfectly and MUCH more clearly, I have a lot of trouble communicating my esoteric interests to others unfortunately. lol So thanks for writing this! 🙂
You’re so right – it can be lonely until we find our community of like-minded souls. Thank god for the ability to meet and learn from each other here on the web. I really appreciate your piece; it states so clearly what we go through. After that life-altering experience which you really can’t put into words that a “measurer” will understand, isolation is very common until we find our tribe. Maybe that’s part of the initiation. I’m so glad I found mine.
I think the loneliness is part of the initiation as well, but too many of us hide in the shadows, and stay alone too long, in silence. As you said, thank god for the web.
I’ve heard that the Pythagoreans used to cut an apple in half horizontally in order to recognize one another. If you do that, there’s a five pointed star inside–the symbol for divine influence on man/matter. I don’t know if the story is true, but I hope it is.
As a chronic “measurer” (at times) myself… I thank you. 🙂
Great piece of writing. Wasn’t Chiron the brilliant but socially rejected and misunderstood hermit who lived in his cave? There is a lot of Chiron energy in this piece of writing. I believe Chiron has as much to do with astrology as Uranus does (Chiron was an astrology teacher after all) and we as astrologers all feel this ‘wounding’. I have for a long time believed that Chiron rules interdimensionality (oneness), interconnection and translation. We as astrologers attempt to translate ‘oneness’ information from the universe for ourselves and other people. And we all connect into the oneness by practising astrology. Your ‘interconnection to the oneness’ experience during your Chiron square validates my view of Chiron as an interdimensional connecting link.
I feel that astrology will once again rise in prominence during the upcoming Uranus-Pluto square. In the meantime, I will continue to ‘keep the faith’ 🙂
Thank you, Wizron. I am very much in agreement with you about Chiron and interdimensionality. It is very much a shamanic energy. Chiron is more than a mere teacher. It is Chiron who anchors the energy of the outer planets into something real. He translates, as you say–he delivers. And this is always a painful practice, leaving us wounded and isolated from the mainstream. We have to focus on the good that we do, the heroes that we make.
I hope you’re right about Uranus/Pluto. The last Uranus/Pluto square wasn’t so promising.
Brilliant
Thank You deeply for this
Personally, I am grateful to astrologers and the work that they do. I can not count the number of times that reading the words of an astrologer has revealed something that would not have occurred to me otherwise. (By the way, this is coming from someone who studied physics in college.)
If you studied physics, you were already in the club, you just didn’t know it. Welcome to your real family.
I know I’m waaaayyyy late to the party here but you guys have NOTHING to complain about. I ran a very popular website about PEak Oil for close to 8 years, quit to pursue astrology and some related endeavors. If you think astrology pisses people off or rangles their feathers, try mentioning Peak Oil! LMAO! No matter how diplomatic you are it’s like major freak out time as soon as that is mentioned. Seriously, I’ve found it down right easy – by orders of magnitude mind you – to mention astrology compared to peak oil. You mentione Peak Oil at a dinner party, even just casually as being a topic you write about as part of what you do and you get dead silence. With astrology, 5 people will say “I don’t believe that stuff” and 5 will either know some of their placements or be curious.
A take on this issue from an Arch Druid friend of mine:
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010_12_01_archive.html
also, the astrologer I see says requests for readings are off the chart. I think there’s a resurgence in interest although attendance at classes may not be a good indicator simply because even if people are more interested the economy is so bad they may not have the money to go. just my thoughts.
one more thing: if you have cool examples for sun/moon combos – like iconic celebrties with those combos or images from Charles Harvey’s book, then people who know their moon, you’ve automatically got something to talk about. and it’s about people’s favorite topic, themselves! (or their friends)
I read this article again today, and I just wanted to express that I love what you are saying in so many levels… congratulations on Your work, Dawn.
Hi Dawn, This post, as well as the comments, have been so thought provoking, and I really appreciate the existence of this site as a place to begin to think and discuss issues like this. There’s nothing like it.
Yes, I have had my own experience with The Measurers! In fact, I was introduced to astrology by a measurer– a polite, left-brained south Indian who read logic for relaxation. He took up astrology in order to disprove it (I think he was embarrassed that his countrymen relied on it so heavily) and ended up becoming an amateur astrologer. I don’t know if in the process his worldview was shaken or shattered; if so, he never let on. I suspect it was for him another device for measuring, and the Universe was simply One Big Clock. He was a Saturnian kind of guy.
I wonder: do measurers know that they love? How do they know? This is not something that can be seen, or registered on a machine. And what would they say is the purpose of awe? Or despair for that matter?
The emptiness at the center of this worldview was made clear to me as a real-life astrology lesson. (This “lesson” also points to the issues in Dawn’s recent series on chiron/saturn and life past 50.) A few years ago, I was contacted by a college friend, a “Measurer Supreme.” Inventor, university professor, consultant to the computer animation houses– he’d had a super productive, brilliant career. We’d been out of touch for over a decade, but he decided to renew our friendship because he knew that I loved poetry. His best friend had died earlier that year, he explained, and he was overwhelmed by grief. For the first time in his life, he was craving poetry, he was craving story. (Oh, he was likely craving the wisdom in astrology as well, but as everyone here knows, you simply can’t tell a measurer this!) So I sent him poems and read the stories that, at age 55, he had begun to write.
I was reading Stephen Forrest’s book on transits just then and had finished his essay on Ernest Hemingway, how he committed suicide as transiting Mars hit his natal sun. I got an immediate clammy feeling about this and promptly looked up my friend’s chart. Transiting Mars was closing in on *his* natal sun.
I could never have shared with my friend that I had recently begun studying astrology, and even if I could, what in the world could I do with my concerns for his safety? We lived on separate coasts. I urged him to see his counselor, every day if possible, for the next couple weeks.
As chance would have it, I inadvertently included a link to an article on Pluto’s transits in an email message to him. He responded, “Surely you didn’t mean to send me *this.*”
The supercilious contempt was palpable even through the weariness and grief of the rest of his message. It was the last thing I got from him. Sure enough, as Mars passed his Leo Sun, he committed suicide.
Astrology proved itself to me in a harsh and devastating way that year, though it had already astonished me numerable times before, and I vowed from that point forward to tell the truth about the validity of this ancient art. My justification? Why, the scientific method, of course– which is, at its core, about the willingness to be curious about everything under the Sun, to ask questions and investigate, and most importantly, to have the courage to tell the truth about what we learn. The measurers surely can’t argue with that.
/Dawn, writing this brings up a number of questions, one of them: what do you do when you see something troubling, esp. *really* troubling, in someone’s chart? Surely this must be something that every professional astrologer comes to, sooner or later.
Shannon
ps: I thought folks would appreciate this TED talk by Rupert Sheldrake, which was actually banned after he gave it. Because, as anyone knows, when you encounter something that’s so disturbing to your worldview, you’ve got to run in the opposite direction as fast as you can:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKHUaNAxsTg
Beautiful! I’ve never been able to describe the loneliness that you do so eloquently. So many thanks 🙂
Thanks so much for this excellent piece.
This is a wonderful article and I think it expresses much of the feeling of being a professional astrologer nowadays. I felt relieved to know someone thinks the same way I do. Human experience is more, much more than technology and rationality, which are the present-day trendy paradigms. Thanks for putting in words what I’ve been feeling for decades. 🙂
Thank you very much.
Every comprehensive treatise is a great support to those of us evolving.
Best wishes.
This is one of the most well thought-out and intelligent pieces I have ever read on the subject. Okay to repost to my blog with links and credit?
Yes, feel free to repost with links and credit. Thanks.
An amazing, amazing article. Thank you.
I discovered your work after your physical passing, Dawn, but know you remain alive to this connection with you across the multiverse. Thank you for your example of fearlessness in practice and for the eloquent way you elucidated astrological phenomenon. May your journey in spirit continue to uplift! God bless you! /Kate