Astro-Mandalas and Meaning Making

 

        On September 28 of 2022 I ordered my first Tarot deck off of Amazon.  It was a Rider-Waite-Smith deck.  On December 1 of 2022 I ordered a copy of Michael S. Schneider's book A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe as my spiritual curiosity was earnestly stoked by the focus and heat of Hestia herself.  Things really started to heat up once I started peering into the geometry that composes our reality.  On December 29th of 2022 I ordered a copy of The Secret Language of Astrology by Roy Gillett.  I decided to open the ephemeris and look at that day to see if there was anything significant occurring in the heavens with respect to my horoscope.  If you don't speak astrology fluently you may want to skip the next paragraph, you won't be missing anything.  

     Indeed, on that day Mercury, whom I would later come to learn is my chart ruler (I would have had absolutely no idea what that meant at the end of 2022), went retrograde at 24 degrees 21' Capricorn.  Venus was also in Capricorn within orb of conjuncting my Aquarian Sun. Mars had just transited over my Ascendant and was just one degree separating from it.  Jupiter had just entered into Aries and was in orb of conjuncting my moon. Saturn was 3 degrees past my Aquarian Median Coeli.  Uranus was also within 10 degrees of being in opposition to it's own natal position and in the sign Taurus which is opposite Scorpio where my natal Uranus is.  This also had Uranus just past my natal Chiron and still within a separating orb of 6 degrees.  Uranus opposing it's own natal position happens around the age of 42 and represents the culmination of the "midlife crisis."  That particular indicator lasts for a couple of years and I'm still in the middle of it (along with Saturn about to oppose it's natal position and Pluto conjuncting my sun).  

    That is a LOT of astrological symbolism that is all very active on my natal chart.  Again, when I ordered that first astrology book I had no idea about any of it and that was just two short years ago.  I was to go on a tour de force through many of the heavy weights in modern astrology.  I jumped right into the deep end with Liz Greene and Howard Sasportas' Seminars in Psychological Astrology.  That's a four volume series.  I didn't know much about astrology, but I've been studying psychology for my entire adult life.  I couldn't believe my luck having found a study combining myth, psychology, and astrology!  I couldn't get enough and began ordering books by the handful from amazon and ebay.  There wasn't a week that went by without an astrology (or tarot) book being dropped off on my porch.  I devoured astrology books by Greene, Sasportas, Arroyo, Forrest, George, Rudhyar, and more.  At last count I was nearing 60 books read on astrology (and still going).  It seemed to me that all of my life was being quantified and summed up in this one discipline, but there was no end to it!  The more I looked the more there was to see, and to this very second that is still the case.  

My interest in the occult has been a lifelong journey that started around the age of 18 when I first renounced Christianity and became an atheist (I'm no longer atheist).  The renunciation was fueled by a Uranian spirit to know the design of reality intimately.  I wanted to know it personally, to understand it intellectually as well as spiritually.  A few months after that I had my first truly metaphysical experience with a full blown out of body experience (OBE) followed by years of lucid dreaming as well as astral travel.  It was a spiritual download that was to indelibly change the fabric of my physical brain as well as my mental and spiritual life.  I had many experiences in those years that all served to show me that reality was not just the physical construct we all believe it to be.  It's in fact very malleable and amenable to the influence of the personal will.  I would later find out that, as John Michael Greer puts it in The Druidry Handbook:

Thus, when will moves in harmony with destiny, the influence of the past has no power.  When will follows the bidding of fate, the deeper potentials of the self remain asleep.  When fate and destiny move together, will struggles against them in vain.  When all three pull in different directions, the soul stumbles through life and achieves little.  When all three work in the same direction, finally, nothing in the universe can stand against them except the walls of Ceugant itself. 

    Ceugant is the Druid conception of infinity.   Astrology is a means by which one can get fate, destiny, and the will all dancing the same dance together.  Astrology provides a very good map that shows you the path to take to get you to Ceugant.  Every human conception of the spiritual involves astrology at some point, and that is always in the beginning.  It may as well be said that in the beginning the rules of astrology had to be worked out.  The problem with this knowledge is that there are misconceptions and misunderstandings with every step one takes.  Astrology can lead you directly into the confused and lost heart of the Woo Woods just as quickly as any other metaphysical system gravitating towards the New Age diaspora.  It's no different with Christianity.  If you don't think there are Christians who have lost their fool heads talking to God than you haven't been paying attention much.  This information is powerful, and it can effect you in ways you haven't bargained for.  

    What most people know of astrology is that it's a means of "fortune telling."  Well, that's not entirely incorrect as far as that goes, but it's really not very correct either, it's much more nuanced than that.  For the most part, at least as Astrology is conceived of now by the vast majority of it's serious practitioners, it's not really telling your fortune at all.  We have free will.  Now if you don't think that we have free will than you should have no problem with believing that the planets made you do it because you really have no legs to stand on in believing in any system of anything.  If it's all just been determined by the big bang than your opinion is not your own, and so if you disagree with me than you disagree with yourself because in that conception I have no control over what I believe either...so what are we arguing about?  I, however, do believe in free will.  Now, our ancient forebears didn't believe in free will much either, and that's why astrology came to be seen as "fortune telling" to begin with.  The original fortunes applied to kingdoms and not to individuals.  It sought to answer questions like "will we go to war," or "will the sky fall and destroy us all," or "will the king die soon?"  Horoscopes applying to individuals didn't get started until the Hellenistic age sometime after Alexander went and conquered most of the known world and brought the East and West into communication with one another.  Still, if we figure around 300 B.C. that gives us over 2300 years of continuous natal astrology.  If we are talking mundane astrology than we go back to somewhere in the neighborhood of 3000 B.C. which gives us 5000 yeas of astrology.  Why is astrology still being practiced today?  Is it just because all of the practicing astrologers are dumb?  You know, the "three wise men" were astrologer right?  Yeah, those Three Wise Men.  The Magi sung about in your Christmas Carols, the ones who followed the Star of Bethlehem to the baby Jesus.  Magi, by the way, is a term for magician.  

There they go, off to find Baby Jesus by following the stars

    The conception of the human generated reality that we inhabit that is found in astrology is excellent.  The 12 fold division of space and time works perfectly.  In fact the number 12, the dodecagon, is a doubling of the hexagon which is the Star of David, among many other names.  Two triangles, one pointing up (fire) and one pointing down (water).  Have you ever wondered why there are 360 degrees in a circle?  Why not 460, or 500 for that matter?  Well one reason is that it's divisible by 12.  That arithmetic equals 30 which happens to be nearly how many days we have in a month, which coincides with how long the earth takes to orbit the sun one time and complete 4 seasons...12 months.  A day happens to be due to how fast Earth spins on her axis and thereby creates one day and night.  That happens to be 24 hours and guess what number that divides into evenly?  Also, 360 divides by 60 perfectly, and 60 happens to be how many minutes are in an hour, as well as how man seconds are in a minute.  None of that is by accident.  In fact it's all due to how long an average human breath takes.  

It doesn't stop there.  From Michael S. Schneider's A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe:

The people of ancient cultures saw themselves and their culture breathing in unison with the turning earth and stars.  The numbers reveal the cosmic structure they perceived.  The number of seconds in one day (86,400 = 12x12x660) is exactly one-tenth the diameter of the sun (864,000 = 12x12x6000) in miles...and the day's 21,600 (=6x6x60) breaths is exactly ten times the moon's diameter of 2,160 miles.  Astronomers also know that the sun travels at 21,600 miles per hour through the galaxy as a satellite around its unknown center.  This number is also one tenth of the mean distance between the earth and moon (=216,000 miles = 60x60x60), which is 100 times its own radius.

    The numbers don't stop there, he continues for several more paragraphs.  Another interesting fact is that the earth orbits the sun at 66,666 miles per hour.   How could anyone look at numbers like that and think anything other than reality is designed by a mathematician who also really happens to like the number 6?  How could somebody look at those numbers and say that it's all just some coincidence of sixiness?  A meaningless coincidence at that.  This is showing that reality is an integrated fabric of meaning.  Everything is integrated down to the time it takes us to breath in and out once.  What of the timing of the rest of the planets in our solar system?  Might they also be a part of the numerical design?  Don't they partake in the same physical reality and orbit the same sun as we do?  Might there orbits also be a part of these calculations?  Might meaning be something other than coincidence?  Might there be purpose to our existences here on our beautiful planet?  Astrologers all answer yes to those questions.  What is astrology then?  

    Astrology is just astronomy applied to the human experience.  It takes the pure numbers of scientific astronomy and transmutes them into human meaning.  It makes poetry out of the numerical design of physical reality.  When I create an astro-mandala using geometrical principles I am attempting to create a work of art that expresses this cosmic and harmonic attunement.  Using a compass, which is a human tool that helps us create perfect circles (also known as the monad), I bring to life a diagram of cosmic significance.  This map is meaningful and it depicts where the planets were in the heavens at the moment of your birth.  This shows your orientation to the cosmos.  I help midwife a nativity through the geometers womb of the Vesica Piscis which puts me in touch with this ancient art.  Patterns emerge in the nativity and those are connected via lines.  Those patterns point to important elements in the destiny of that life's unfolding purpose.  

    Astrology is not Woo, and it's definitely not New Age, as it's been around for thousands of years before Christ.  Clearly it's part of the "New Age" movement, but what I mean is that it doesn't define the New Age movement.  Calling it new is like calling North America the "New World," but worse than that, because it predates Christianity by a minimum of a couple thousand years which would make it old even by "old world" standards.  Why would astrology have persisted throughout all of recorded human history and beyond were it just nonsense?  Have all of those astrologers just been quacks bamboozled by charlatans and crafty salesmen?  To be fair, there are plenty of those individuals hocking astrology for money, always has been and always will be.  There's also a church on every corner with another church across the street and they are all saying that the way to heaven can only be found via their pulpit, and Jesus was a Jew who would have been comfortable with a Star of David around his neck.  A hexagram.  The same hexagram I use to generate an astrological mandala that shows your relationship to our manifest reality.  For me it's a practice in sacred knowledge.  

    Do the planets make us do the proverbial it?  Absolutely not!  Nothing in the horoscope makes you do anything because you have free will.  What the planets do is reflect our reality.  We are in creative union with the heavens, with the Earth.  We breath, laugh, cry, and create on Earth under the Moon and Sun.  Nobody knows why astrology works, but it does work.  Maybe it works simply due to some type of numinous participation mystique.  Maybe the post-modernist are correct in the idea that we create our human reality by defining words.  But if that is true than those words are actually defined by a process that is so beyond our scope of understanding that it may as well be defined as God.  That is the choice that we have to make.  Does meaning and purpose exist, or is it all just some type of deterministic and cosmic non-god joke?  You get to decide, and if you don't believe that than the endless void awaits you.  It groans with nothingness, but you won't even hear the groaning.  It's a black hole where even light goes to die.  Why would anyone want to live in a world devoid of all meaning?  I seek to help reenchant our world.  Astrological mandalas are just one way by which I have found to do that.