By Eric Francis
From time to time, Real Astrology invites guests to blow off steam, examine their souls, or rhapsodize about the stars. We're filing the following under the "Blowing Off Steam" category. Give it a read; let us know what you think--it made us smile.
Astrology is based on the idea that there is some relationship between human existence and the model of the solar system. For some people, this is a stretch longer than fitting nylon pantyhose on an elephant. For others, it's obvious that we live in one reality and that the whole show is not just connected by some ideas and theories, but that in actual fact, life is one holistic experience of planets, bugs, people, trees, computers, rocks, thought, and everything else with which we share existence. Therefore, conscious, careful, and loving astrology should be a pretty good reflecting pool in which to observe our realities.
But there is a problem.
The unwritten rules of traditional astrology dictate that you should not have too many ideas of your own; stay between the lines; be careful not to ask too many questions because there are not so many answers; and that The Ancients have figured it all out for us. But The Ancients--whether they lived in 425 B.C. or in 1971 A.D.--weren't just practicing astrology.
Their astrology was part of a larger life, and that life contained a world view that was informed by a very different world. When we use their astrology, we subscribe to their world view. This is often quite crude and fatalistic. Modern, groovy astrology is often hung up on the personality level and the more cluttered energetic planes (astral and causal), and can barely contain the experiences of our current life.
I have a client who has repeatedly commented to me that when she is having serious problems, she comes to see me rather than her therapist because I don't have a button on my desk--the one that he could push for the guys in white to cart her off to the locked ward upstairs. That is not therapy, that's death. But modern astrologers are not so far from this.
Crudely put, when we use dead astrology from dead eras and dead myths, our minds turn to bullshit. Astrology ends up being static and stuck and theoretical rather than being alive and creative, growing and changing and experimental. We might as well have a button on our desks. When we explore astrology creatively, from within our present context and knowledge, and from what our senses and intuition are telling us, we create a new world view based on the circumstances and events of our reality as we experience them. This is a creative process.
Anything else is dead.
The astrological charts we use, for example, abound with lies: The planets move in ellipses, not circles. Everyone knows this, yet the chart is drawn in a circle. Because the Sun is moving around the galaxy, the planets actually move in elliptical spirals through space and time. You would never know this from an astrological chart. On a typical chart, it appears that Saturn comes back to the same place every 29 years, but it really does no such thing. Because the Sun is moving and Saturn is following it, Saturn might show up at the same point in seven or 27 or 3,000 galactic years--calculated at about 250,000,000 Earth years each.
We still use a geocentric model almost exclusively, and rarely do we ever dare to look at a heliocentric chart. Yet, word got out in 1609 that the Sun is actually at the center of the solar system, and old Copernicus and Galileo and a lot of other people have been hassled immensely for showing us this. They did good work, but we have ignored them. Perhaps we should all join the Flat Earth Society, an actual group that believes the Earth is flat.
And then there is the small question of the Milky Way galaxy. Oh, that thing.
Can anyone point to the galactic center on their natal chart? Have you ever considered its meaning? What about the black hole at its center--that's really wild. When I was a kid, black holes were a theory. Now we have one as our neighbor, the central Sun. Why isn't the galaxy a factor, a major factor, in our astrological considerations? I've only seen it listed in one ephemeris and the only person to mention it who stands out in my memory was Barbara Hand Clow. Like Trudeau's Boopsie, she's never afraid to get cosmic.
Then, after already having been grossly distorted beyond recognition, except to the most abstract thinkers, our whole cosmos gets smashed onto a sheet of paper by a computer printer. Ouch. The planets in space are three-dimensional, colorful, extremely strange and positively magnificent, not boring and flat, black and white.
And then, for the grand finale, we assume that this 89th degree abstraction actually says something about us, and with this as our most trusted tool, we set about practicing psychic surgery on our friends, neighbors, children, pets, clients, and ourselves. The funny thing is, it often somewhat works--though I think we can work a lot better.
Drawn to the mysteries of the universe and with a love of God, as most astrologers surely are, we try to shove this confusing, dusty, old model and all its rules and mechanisms into our heads like a 7th grade English teacher pounding Shakespeare into the tormented minds of young students who need to see the actual play on an actual stage in order to comprehend it.
As astrologers, we are much the same way. We need a taste of reality. We all need a long peek through the Hubble space telescope and a week in the Space Shuttle. We need to be strapped to a mountain top flat on our backs and be made to search for comets and shooting stars, not holed up in some conference center debating house systems.
The responses of astrologers to the idea of new planets is quite interesting. Some are very open minded; we all know a couple of them. But at a cocktail party at the 1996 Project Hindsight conference, where they study ancient astrology dug out of places like the Great Pyramid and King Tut's tomb, I asked venerable astrologer Robert Schmidt what he thought about Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.
His response, as though I were mentioning incest or some other family secret, was to reprimand me for dragging that kind of thing up--what he is doing, he averred, is hard enough. As it was my big moment to gain a few pearls of wisdom from The Great Astrologer, I changed the subject and politely asked what he thought of Chiron. Stupid question I guess--he turned his back on me and walked away.
Now, I know that Robert Schmidt is a brilliant man or I wouldn't even bother mentioning him. But it's a good thing I have a sense of humor, or I wouldn't have gotten the joke. And the joke is on all of us because Schmidt's reaction is precisely what many astrologers do when it comes to the outer planets, Chiron, and asteroids. They turn their backs. They run. They hide in Saturn's rings. They start talking about Vulcan. They say things like, "There are too many asteroids! It's just a bunch of space junk! Give me a break, there's one named after Jerry Garcia! That shit is in-comp-re-hensible. And Pluto sucks!"
All true enough. I am an astrologer. It's my job to be empathic. I have Cancer rising; I can't help it. There are a lot of asteroids and Pluto does suck.
But still. Denial takes many forms. For example, I still hear people say that the outer planets are impersonal and generational and that you can't feel their effect on an individual level. Actual astrologers still say this. Goodness freaking gracious! Tell it to someone with Uranus rising, or someone experiencing Pluto square Saturn. You can't feel their effect on a personal level?
Half the people experiencing Pluto square Saturn haven't gotten out of bed this morning. Their heads are still under the covers. Eighty-three percent of the people with Uranus rising wouldn't get anywhere near an astrologer. They would so be bored they would rather die. Others question what possible effect Chiron, asteroids, or Kuiper Belt objects can have if they are so small in diameter. This proves how little these particular astrologers have thought about what they do.
Forget about the fact that Pluto is nothing more than a frozen fart--one that will kick your ass. Tell me, how many kilometers in diameter is Virgo? How much does the North Node weigh? Has anyone ever gotten a good look at the 11th house cusp through a telescope? And how much gravity is the Part of Fortune exerting on your head?
Ugh. And then when an astrologer appears on TV or in the newspaper, they usually sound like a superstitious moron and make the rest of us look like such, too. One of the World's Most Brilliant Astrologers, an ancient text specialist, lived in my area back near Woodstock, New York. One day the local daily newspaper called him up to ask him about the effects of the coming eclipse. He replied that it would be bad for cattle.
What cattle? The 16 lonely cows of the Hudson Valley forgotten in the smash of progress? Perhaps it was an eclipse in Taurus.
There's a guy named Brad Blanton who teaches Gestalt therapists and other people about radical honesty, and he says that the key to enlightenment is the mantra, "Duuuuhhhhh." Money-back guarantee, he assures, just recite this mantra for half an hour and you will become Buddha.
Now, I think that astrologers can learn more from the Gestalts then they can from just about anyone else. I am currently living in Germany and I looked up the word 'gestalt' in the dictionary and it turns out to mean "shape." The astrological chart is a shape and the position of the solar system is a shape and when we are doing work with our clients we are studying the shape of their lives and the shape of things and its effect on their experiences. Duuuuhhhhh!
When our model of the solar system is as a flat, boring, paper-thin slice of bullshit; when we can't see it the way it looks; when we can't conceive of things the way they actually are; when we don't know one-tenth of what's currently known about our little solar system as astronomers are coming up with ever more superclusters of galaxies; and when we're scared by comets and have never heard of exoplanets--planets that orbit other stars--our astrology suffers and our clients suffer and we learn less and have less fun and our brains turn to stale gray mush instead of wild beautiful gardens where everything grows and lives and flies around and munches things and breathes, and where the Moon shines at night.
Perhaps the reason that astrology seems so hard to learn is that it's so boring and because it's nearly impossible to get into a discussion about astrology without reverting to bullshit mode. Bullshit, by the way, is a highly technical term from Gestalt therapy coined by Fritz Pearls, and it means just that: the bullshit that people lay on each other and suffocate in.
Our astrology is buried in the stuff, it is largely made of it, and we're gasping for air and struggling for life and crying out for a little meaning. In actual fact, astrology practiced as a living art and constant investigation of reality can be an amazingly beautiful way of looking at the world as we go though the series of presently-unlocking cosmic gateways on the way to love and freedom and getting our chaotic lives together for a change.
But that's very challenging because modern astrology is largely a prison of lies, dead concepts, and mental garbage made of centuries of past rubble and scraps of slag left behind from the industrial production of religion, philosophy, and science, with a little mythology and mathematics mixed in for good measure.
Centaurs--a new and emerging class of planets that I am researching--are not the answer. Imagination is. And investigation is, as is the questioning of our experiences and ideas. Centaurs help because they really make us work; we have to figure them out. They are sending astrology back to the ancient Greek myths and getting astrologers to pick up the phone to call astronomers and getting us to interview our clients, compile data, and walk with our feet on the ground. That is progress.
But in the purely spiritual sense, I believe that the answer resides first in admitting that we are clueless; that we have no idea where the fuck we are or how we got here; in recognizing that many of us doubt we really are here; and that many more live like we're really not here. After a while, it turns out to be that way.
I think that a great question for astrologers is: How did I get here at all? What's the story? Where is here? And since we work with the model of the solar system, and since science is coming up with tons of information about it these days, what's the latest scoop? What have we learned in this century? What isn't being written about or publicized, and, most importantly, what are the implications for our understanding of what it means to be a human?
Eric Francis contributes this as a continuation of an open diary on his work with the Centaur planets, including Chiron, Pholus, Nessus, and 1994TA. It is intended as a documentary journal, not as professional journalism. To find where ephemerides and books and articles about the Centaur planets are available, e-mail him at ethos@Star-Navigator.com or visit "The Worlds of Eric Francis" at www.Star-Navigator.com. For AOL members, go to Mystic Gardens on America Online UK. Eric does private readings.
Astrology As the Art of Bullshit 
