The Oracle Speaks: An Excerpt From My New Book

Hey everyone, this is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology, and today, I'm really excited to share with you guys an excerpt from my new book, which is called The Oracle Speaks. This is a project that has been a long time in the making. It's been almost ten years exactly since my first book was published.

I'm going to tell you a little bit about my first book if you don't know me as an author, if you only know me as an astrologer, so that you can know a little bit about my background as a writer, and then I'm going to tell you a little bit about the book. You know what it's about and how you can get hold of it, and I'm going to leave you with an excerpt from the book to give you a little taste of what it's like, and that will be an audio recording of the preface to the book. So, I hope you guys will enjoy this. I can't believe it's been so long, and there were times when I just didn't know if I'd ever write a book again. So I'm really, really excited to be in that creative space right now, and I hope you guys will enjoy what I've written.

Before we get further into things today, don't forget to like and subscribe. You can find a transcript of today's talk on the website nightlightastrology.com, and you guys know that really soon, we have the start of my new program, Ancient Astrology for the Modern Mystic, which is starting on November 18. Click on the first-year course to learn more about the program.

We had some alumni on last week talking about the program; if you want to hear more about their experience actually being a student, you can check out that video from last week. It's a video on ancient astrology and why it's so fun to study.

There are 30 classes on the year, and everything is held via live webinar. It's all recorded. If you can't attend live because of time zones or work conflicts or, you know, whatever the case might be. There's a lot of supportive material that's there to help you through the program, from breakout study sessions with a tutoring staff to a staffed discussion forum that's always there.

We can always answer your questions there; you can email me for support; there's a lot of bonus material and quizzes, and a workbook and all sorts of stuff that we've designed to make the process easier and for people who are seeking to go professional, this course will support you in that intention, or people who are just looking to deepen their lives with astrology. The course really supports both intentions.

At the bottom of the page, you'll find the options for enrollment, early bird saves you $500 off, use the payment plan, spread the payments out over a year, or you can use the tuition assistance. We still have plenty of room left in the tuition assistance program. So, if you're someone who needs a little help to make the dream or goal of studying professional astrology, a deep immersion into a course like this, you need a little bit of a different price point to make it possible to use the tuition assistance, we'd be very happy to work with you. We know that some people are in very different situations, so we want to make sure that it's accessible to study astrology for all people.

All right, well, I am going to show you this is the book that I wrote. It was published in 2010. It's called Fishers of Men: The Gospel of an Ayahuasca Vision Quest. At the time, this was the work that I had; I had worked on this through my master's degree in creative writing. It was my creative thesis.

Then I worked on it through my MFA program, a second degree in creative writing, and then I worked on it for a few more years with an editor and an agent, and it was published in 2010 by Tarcher-Penguin.

This launched my whole career. I mean, because of this book, which was a book about Ayahuasca, it was a creative nonfiction, sort of memoir about experiences with Ayahuasca and lineage of mental health challenges among the men in my family, and especially the combination of kind of Christian faith and theology and mental illness and it was really just a healing adventure story.

That book facilitated me in developing a platform from which I was able to kind of share with everyone my passion and interest in astrology, and then my astrology career took off.

That was ten years ago, and honestly, I tried writing another book not long after, but I gave up because I wasn't feeling it, and then for many, many years, I felt zero inspiration, authentic, genuine inspiration. Aside from a voice, it's like you wrote a book, that means you should write another one, and I was like, Oh, that's not a good reason to write a book. I need something that I really, really care about.

So today, I'm really happy to share that I have a book that I am in the process of writing. The book is called The Oracle Speaks, and it is a collection of stories about divination. Today, I'm going to leave you with an excerpt from the book. It's an audio recording of me reading the preface to the book, which will give you some background as to where the book is coming from, what it's about, and a personal story that led to the writing of the book itself.

What I want to say about this is a few things. One, the real intention of the book, as you'll hear me explaining in the preface, is to tell stories that illustrate what divination is more than any textbook explanation could; in my opinion, the best way to understand what divinatory consciousness is or what a divinatory lifestyle is, or what it means to be a diviner is really difficult to do in like intellectual speak.

I pride myself on trying to explain these things in classes and so forth. But I find myself time and time again. Going back to stories, stories, your stories, my stories, client stories, the students in the program, and the stories they share. These have always been my best teachers, the stories I hear, the stories I've lived.

So, this book is not a textbook. It is a book about the interior experience of having a relationship with an Oracle. Most of you listening to this know exactly what I'm talking about because you're into astrology because you have a relationship with an Oracle, the Oracle, an Oracle. It's just a word.

You have a relationship with a wise voice that speaks through the symbols of astrology or Tarot or the I-Ching. What is that? Where does it come from? This book is about trying to address those questions. through storytelling, through sharing stories from my own life. I am a personal storyteller. That's what I like to do.

So I like hearing your stories just as much, and this is a book that is trying to capture something of the biographical arc of how I developed a relationship with Oracle's. So I hope you will enjoy it. It's so nice. It was this book that really comes as Uranus has squared my ascendant ruler, Venus, and sort of reawakened an artistic part of me that I haven't felt.

You know, it hasn't been as active for a long time. But I also have been waiting because I knew I'm a writer. I am, I'm an artist, and at that level, there's a lot of fulfillment that I get in making creative content like this all the time. That's it kind of scratches that itch.

But I knew I was not going to push with a book. It's just great to me that a book is like a great work, and there was a lot of soul and heart and Benin's sacrifice that went into writing my first book, and whenever it's time, I'll know. And so this past summer of 2023, I just knew I knew it was time to start writing this fall.

Originally, this series was something that I thought was going to be a 12-part podcast series on the question, what is divination?
The more that I tried to address that series and create it from an intellectual standpoint, the more frustrated I became until I realized that this isn't the mode I want to use. I want to use storytelling, so The Oracle Speaks was going to be a 12 bar podcast series. Instead, it's become a 12-chapter book. Each chapter constitutes a story or series of stories that I think address the question, and I hope you will. I really I know you're gonna love it. I really, at least I think a lot of you will.

How can you get a hold of this? You're going to hear an excerpt, which is the preface. I am releasing this in 12 installments. That will be through a private Nightlight Astrology school course page that you can you'll be able to purchase through this year's Kickstarter, which begins in a few weeks; it's my annual fundraiser for the content that I create.

One of the rewards when you donate will be access to the Oracle Speaks, which will be released in on the Thinkific page that we use, just like a class portal page where you can download or you can download the text versions or listen to each chapter as an audio recording. I recommend listening to the audio recording because I think it's truer to the creative essence of what I'm trying to communicate, and you'll hear me say more about that in the preface. But I have the text versions there for people who would prefer to read.

It'll be released in 12 installments of the 12 chapters between now and October 2024. If you didn't get this through last year's Kickstarter, you'll be able to through this year's, and as soon as you sign up, we'll be reaching out to people as they sign up so that you can join in the next couple of weeks and start listening. The first chapter has already been released, and people who got this through last year's Kickstarter are already off and listening to this. So if you want to join them in just a couple of weeks when the Kickstarter begins, you'll be able to make a donation to the Kickstarter support this channel pickup have a copy, and you'll be joining them and picking up on the first chapter as well.

I plan to release the chapters one at a time, probably around one month at a time. But we'll The goal is to wrap up the release of all 12 chapters by October of 2024. The first chapter was, I mean, it was like, I just felt like it was rocket fuel. I was so excited to be in the zone again as a creative writer. I'm not sure it's as great as I felt like it was, you know, but I hope you'll enjoy it, especially those of you who know that astrology is so much about the relationship that you form, with the intelligence behind the symbols, that the thing that is speaking to us through the transits, and through the symbolism, so

I'm not going to say anymore; you'll be able to pick it up in the Kickstarter in a couple of weeks. I hope that you know you'll all enjoy it. For those of you who have already listened to it, I hope you're enjoying the first chapter. For those of you who are thinking about it, I hope that the preface will get you excited and that you'll pitch in support of the channel and pick up a copy in the weeks to come. That's it for today. Enjoy this excerpt from the preface, and we'll see you again soon. Bye, everyone.

Preface:
I was recently interviewed by a colleague about my favorite astrological texts of all time; she asked me what three books I would bring to a desert island if I could bring only three to read for the rest of my life. My number one pick was a book called The Moment of Astrology by Jeffery Cornelius.

The book isn't an astrological textbook; it doesn't teach you any methods or approaches to reading charts. Instead, it's a book about what astrology is. It's about what is happening when the symbols of a chart come alive in a reading and powerful ideas, predictions, or descriptions occur. It's about what kind of knowledge astrology conveys and by what means astrology has the power to convey such knowledge in the first place.

It is also a book that invites the reader to consider that astrology isn't a science but a form of divination. But even more than that, it's a text that invites us to explore what divination is throughout all of history and across the world in so many different traditions.

What is this special way of knowing and conveying truth that humans have used for 1000s of years? A tradition that is still stubbornly alive today despite the rational protests of so many empirically minded people and institutions.

What is an Oracle? How do we communicate with Oracle? How do we interpret their messages, and why? What kind of Wisdom does an Oracle convey, and how?

Cornelius, this book forced me to deeply consider what I was actually doing as an astrologer. His book forced me to consider how something like astrology was possible at all, and for this reason, the moment of astrology became one of my favorite books of all time.

Of course, I never would have heard about his book if it weren't for the experiences I was having with Ayahuasca shamanism over the course of a decade. Jeffery Cornelius's work was recommended to me through an apprenticing shaman of one of the Maestros I had been drinking Ayahuasca with in Peru.

The shamans' apprentice was a veteran astrologer from the UK who had been a longtime student of Jeffries, and so although the book was quite famous already, I came to hear about the book through him. Sometime later, after he had received the title of Maestro himself, he was kind enough to foot the bill to fly Jeffrey to the United States, where I hosted him for my students and members of the local astrology community in New York City. This was 2014.

Although his book had already made a tremendous impact on me, and I was only four years into my professional practice of astrology, hosting Jeffrey for that week of lectures and workshops made an even deeper and more lasting impression on me. I related these thoughts on the podcast as a way of explaining why it would be one of my three favorite books on the desert island, and then the host and I shared some fond memories of the event because it turns out she had also been there when Jeffrey came to teach in New York.

Then, I shared a story with her about a conversation I had with Jeffrey at the end of his week-long stay. I was telling Jeffrey that I was working on a book about astrology and divination, and I was trying to tell stories about astrology that might convey something that textbooks cannot.

After a long-winded attempt to explain the idea of my book to him, he looked at me with a slide but kindly smile, and he said, Wait ten years and then write your book. It felt very insulting at the time. I was fresh off writing my first book, a memoir about ayahuasca shamanism, which had been published by an imprint of Penguin and was already a Publishers Weekly book of the year and the religion genre in 2010.

I toured across the country at bookstores and radio stations, talking about the book telling people about the healing power of psychedelic medicines and the beauty of this, at the time, a little-known Amazonian healing tradition. Honestly, I thought I was ready to write a book about astrology. But it turns out he was right, and it turns out I could never really unhear what he had said, and the image of his wise grandfatherly face would pop up over the next year anytime I tried to write The book until finally, I gave up trying.

I never took his ten-year suggestion literally, though, and honestly, I had forgotten all about it. I always thought it was just his veteran way of saying get more experience. First, you'll write a much better book if you do. Ten years, I thought, was an arbitrary number he tossed out, which, again, I hadn't been thinking about at all. In fact, I'm pretty sure he would have said the same thing at the time. I don't mean ten years, literally; I just mean get deeper into your career before writing a book about astrology.

So, it was shocking to me when the host of the podcast that I was on, who had no idea that I had started working on this book, already said, Well, hey, it's been ten years since you had that talk with Jeffrey looks like it's time for you to write your book. So it had.

Holy cow. I laughed nervously. But my hair stood on end from the shock of the realization, I shivered, and I got a flush of goosebumps, which Jeffrey said to me ten years ago, turned out to be its own ORACULAR moment and so it shouldn't be a surprise that a book of stories about these kinds of moments got started with one of its own and that, simply put is the purpose of this book.

This book is my attempt to convey what I've learned about astrology thus far. But even more basically, this is a collection of stories that I hope will take readers into the ancient and primordial experience of divination of having an ongoing, mysterious, beautiful, and wise conversation with something that we cannot possibly name. Even though I personally use the word Oracle to describe it in the title of this book.

I chose storytelling as my medium after much consideration. At first, I thought this was going to be a 12-part podcast series exploring the idea that astrology should be understood as a form of divination rather than a science. No matter what I came up with as I tried to develop the series, I just kept hearing the same voice stating the same thing. Stories work better. Tell stories.

I also chose to record myself reading the chapters and deliver them in audio form after much consideration. I've included the text in case people prefer to read, but at the heart of the astrological experience for both the diviner and the querent is the process of listening and being read to. There's something about hearing stories audibly spoken. That is very much like hearing an astrologer weave together a message or delineation rooted in the multi-valence symbols of a birth chart.

So I hope that you will enjoy these stories and I hope that you will sit with them in contemplation. They are themselves symbols, I think, as much as they are my own personal experiences.