The Sun went into sidereal Cancer. The rainy season here in Japan stopped. The Sun is out. The ocean is salty. The clouds are beautiful. I feel like offering a special discount to celebrate!
10% off every reading I do, for as long as the Sun stays in Cancer!
here is a photo I took yesterday
of the Cancer-Sun lit sky
from under makeshift beach umbrellas
This is an except from Chapter 25 of my book, Unlocking the Meanings of a Horoscope, the textbook for my course of the same name. Everything mentioned in summary below gets a treatment of full explanation in that book and, especially, in the course.
I started out with the metaphor of an astrologer being like a sculptor, and I want to return to that metaphor now. The first step in making a sculpture is to get reliable material to sculpt, and to figure out what that material is best suited for. What you can do easily with clay you cannot do easily with marble, and similarly what marble can accomplish cannot be accomplished easily with clay.
The first step in unlocking a horoscope is to get an accurate and reliably calculated birth chart, and review the rising sign in full scope down to the lunar mansion and navamsha subdivisions, as well as the sign, mansion and navamsha of the Moon. This is analogous to getting your sculpting materials set up and assessing what final product these materials is inherently more suited to produce.
The first bit of actual work a sculptor does is to start to carve out the basic shapes of various areas of the sculpture. In astrology, you feel-out and define the basic outline of an individual’s horoscope by individualizing the rising sign. This requires you to asses the elemental and modal balance in the individual chart, the placement of the first house ruler, the overall situation regarding key houses, and the friends and enemies in the birth chart.
Once a sculptor is satisfied with the basic form of his or her sculpture, she begins to work on smaller units in it, bringing out the first details in the sculpture’s main elements: the shape of an eye, lips, nose, etc. The Astrologer does this by doing a planet by planet overview considering their signs, houses and lordship placements from a wide and inclusive angle.
The sculpture starts to become a work of art when the artist connects themes and motifs across more than just one element. A curvature of line in the eyes repeated in the carving of the hair, for example, makes both elements far more dynamic and artistic then they would be on their own. The next step of unlocking a horoscope is very similar, because it requires the astrologer to look for connections between multiple elements in the chart. I call these “combinations.” The astrologer first identifies all the mutual links the planets form in the horoscope, and evaluates if these links constitute Power, Wealth, Health, or other types of important combinations. The astrologer also need to become aware of the basic depth and intensity of any combinations he or she uncovers.
The greatest amount of artistic skill and craftsmanship is in the very finest details of the sculpture. Analogously the final phase of unlocking the horoscope is the most detailed and will make the difference between a “pretty good” reading and a “life changing” one. To polish out the fine details in the horoscope – details which will give the final definition of all the shapes, elements, and motifs you have unlocked so far – the astrologer must asses each planet in three dimensions: motive, strength and influence. To do so, he or she will examine the True Dignity, outstanding subdivisions, Sixfold Strength, dispositors, and exact aspects for all the planets in the horoscope. This information allows a complete and thorough final definition of every note previously made during the process of reading the horoscope.
When the sculpture is done, the artist puts it on display somewhere. For an astrologer, this is analogous to actually delivering and communicating a reading to the client. By following the steps above an astrologer can fully process all the facts of a horoscope and succinctly distill exact effects and outcomes. All the interpretations of the horoscope will be at your fingertipes, and you can freely discuss it with your client in whatever format you choose to work.
I will stop short of teaching you how to communicate this information to your client, because that very broad and important subject is a course of study unto itself. (I am working on the textbook for that course now: VA 102: On Being an Astrologer.)
At first you will want to go through every step for every planet in every horoscope. This is a lot of work, but it is part of what you have to do. “Practice, practice, practice.” Later on, after you have successfully read perhaps a hundred or so charts, you will be more free to follow specific threads of meaning relevant to the concerns and questions of the querent without having to explicitly go through each end every step. The reason you will be able to do this is that your mind will be able to process these steps much more quickly. It is not that you will ever depart from these steps, but when you become seasoned they steps will come more naturally, and sometime without being explicitly noticed.
Excerpt of the second draft of the first chapter of my forthcoming book!
This party was boring. Okay. Most parties are boring, but tonight I just wasn’t in the mood to accept boredom. I looked around for a solution and noticed a man and woman sitting on a white leather couch. They looked bored too. This was going to work.
I sat down with a smile and, without introducing myself in the least, said, “I believe in astrology.”
I love doing stuff like this, I admit. I just love watching people try to deal with the unexpected. This was really unexpected. And these two people were searching for the right kind of smiles to put on in response to my rather outlandish one-liner. Well, she was. To be honest, he was leaning away from me and sort of glaring down his nose at me like I was trying to “steal his girl.”
Which I wasn’t.
At all.
She broke the silence, “So, you’re into astrology?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think it’s real.”
The guy started looking around the room, as if looking for something that could come to his rescue. For her part, her eyebrows went up and she opened her eyes wide. “Like, you mean you think it’s totally true?”
I sort of nodded, because really – as I will explain to you – the answer is not a perfect “yes.” So I just nodded slightly. “What about you?”
“Well, I think it’s interesting..” She answered.
“…But not real?” I asked.
“Well no, I think it’s sort of made up. But it’s interesting and maybe it’s helpful to some people…” she explained.
At this point, the guy actually got up and walked off. I thought that was rather ridiculous of him on so many levels, but actually when he left the conversation took off. Negative energy, he had.
“That’s probably because,” I said shifting slightly closer on the couch, hoping the white leather wouldn’t make fart noises while I did so, “you never really encountered astrology before.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I say ‘Astrology’,” I answered, “you think of… what? Where do you find astrology?”
“Well like on FaceBook some of my friends have their daily horoscopes and stuff. Or like in the newspaper or whatever, it tells you your horoscope. You know!” She was actually smiling honestly now. That’s good because if this conversation didn’t work out I was just going to ditch the party and go back to my room.
“That’s not astrology.” I said flatly.
She expected me to say more, but I didn’t I just waited. Eventually she asked, “Well then what is it?”
“It’s as close to being astrology as that lady’s opinion about how to cure AIDS is close to medicine.” I said, pointing at some random person in the room (who was actually looking at us, which makes it more fun, by the way). “Who is your favorite band?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I guess The Beatles.”
“Oh that’s great, I love The Beatles too.” I said. “Remember when The Backstreet Boys were trying to make themselves out to be some modern equivalent of The Beatles?”
“Yeah!” She laughed with perfect sarcasm.
“Exactly. The Backstreet Boys are actually a lot closer to being The Beatles than that fluffy nonsense you can read in a “daily horoscope” is to being actual astrology.”
She was shocked. At least that was what her face looked like. You could tell she was really interested in getting more info on this idea. In fact at some point during the conversation, I didn’t exactly notice when, two or three other people had gravitated towards us and started eavesdropping.
I explained to her (to them, really) that astrology is a complex and ancient science involving dozens of factors interplaying with one another in trillions of combinations.
And then I said, “Mass Media – which really is the root cause of destroying so many genuine and authentic things in the world – destroyed astrology.” Then, to give it a bit of a dramatic flair I said, “Mass media murdered astrology.”
Of course, I had to reply to “How?”
I explained that the importance of astrology to people a few hundred years ago inspired pioneering newspaper editors to capitalize on the interest by attempting to give astrological guidance to their readers.
But to do so is literally impossible.
To do a real astrological reading for someone you must first create a map of the heavens at the time the person was born. Astrologers call this a “birth chart.” This map is what the astrologer “reads” to give you accurate information about yourself and the events in your life. It is literally impossible to create this map unless you know a person’s date of birth, time of birth, and place of birth!
How could a newspaper even start to do this? You can’t collect that kind of information from your subscribers and readers, and you certainly can’t print a separate horoscope for each individual who reads your paper!
So they did what any good mass media entrepreneur should do – dumb it down.
The most important thing in astrology, the focal point of the entire “map” that is a birth chart, is the “Ascendant” – which is the point in the zodiac which rises over the eastern horizon when you are being born. To know the ascendant you need to know the time and place of your birth, not just the day. Well, mass media says, “That’s too bad. We can’t know these things from our readers so let’s just chuck it in the can.”
And so they did.
The next most important thing in astrology is the Moon.
But this whole mass media explosion happened in Europe, where the calendar is not based on the Moon, but on the Sun. (Honestly though, our current western calendar is such a mess that you almost can’t tell what it is based on anymore). So this means that everyone knows what day they were born on, but almost no one knows the lunar day of their birth. This means that if you wrote a newspaper column telling people “their horoscopes” according to their Moon sign, you would be a little bit closer to real astrology, but almost no one would read it – because they wouldn’t have a clue which “sign” pertained to them.
So, “chuck it.” They chucked the Moon too.
This leaves us with the 2nd runner up, the third more important astrological factor, The Sun.
Bingo! This works. If you know what day you were born, you can look it up in an ultra simple table and know “your sign.” And once you know your sign you can have FaceBook tell you your future!
Yay!
Hoorah for astrology, now everyone can easily read about their horoscope for free!
Too bad everything they are reading is complete bunk because it is only related to one out of dozens of crucial astrological factors – and even that one factor is not the most important, not even the second most important factor in astrology. Aaaaand even after all that they are treating the signs of the Sun as if they were monolithic things that are the same all the way through – when the fact of the matter is that there are at least nine majorly different areas within each sign!
By this time we weren’t even on the couch anymore. We were standing around a table full of snacks. We had 5 other people hanging around us too. And I could tell they were about to chime in with some interesting stuff.
Man, this worked out well. It was really turning into a party worth being at!
- Vic DiCara
