The Sky Speaks — An Astrologer Reacts to a Social Scientist and the New York Times

Hey everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology [https://nightlightastrology.com/].

Today I'm going to respond to an article that was published in the New York Times on September 7, saying that your zodiac sign is 2000 years out of date. Interestingly, on the same day, which was the day of a lunar eclipse in the sign of Pisces, a social scientist named Adam Grant said that astrology was a bunch of BS, and that got a lot of attention as well.

I find it interesting that both of these attacks on astrology came on the day of a lunar eclipse in Jupiter sign while Mars was squaring Jupiter. And I want to talk about that today because I think it's really fascinating. But I also want to give you some practical ways of responding to these criticisms.

So I hope that you will find this bonus episode enjoyable before we get into it, as always, remember to like and subscribe, share your comments. Your comments, reflections, turn on that notification bell, so you know when we've got a new episode, you can find transcripts of any of these daily talks on my website, which is Nightlight astrology.com,

no promotions for the day, because it's a bonus episode on the weekend. Let's go ahead and get into it.

So first of all, I'm going to put the New York Times article up on the screen. Here it is. It says your zodiac sign is 2000 years out of date. Over millennia, our view of the stars has shifted because of the Earth's wobble. It may be time to rethink your sign.

Well, first of all, before we get into this and responding to it, let's just note that this article seems to come out every couple of years now, it seems to be for entertainment value, and I don't know why they keep re running it, especially given that usually they get a pretty big response of people trying to correct their inaccurate understanding of the history of astrology and how the Zodiac is measured, which it just seems like by now they would have gotten the memo.

But anyway, one of the things you can tell right away in an article like this is it may be time to rethink your sign, but anyone who spent even just a little bit of time studying astrology knows that it's not just your sign.

The picture of a birth chart is an elaborate ecosystem of symbols, signs, planets, houses, aspects, dignities, phasal dynamics, the interpretation of all of those things, depending upon the unique context that you bring to an astrologer, is an art form that goes well beyond the idea of there being a sign that is you somehow.

So we all know this, but this is just something that, right away can tip you off to the fact that whoever's writing this that probably doesn't have a real deep grasp of astrology as an elaborate divinatory language, right? So keep that in mind.

But let's go on and talk about the real issue here, whether you care about your horoscopes or not. By the way, we can then again, see that anyone who is thinking of astrology purely as horoscopic content is already thinking about it at a very superficial level. Not that horoscope horoscopes aren't valid or interesting, but horoscopes and your sign is just the tip of the iceberg.

You've probably known it for most of your life. Zodiac signs were originally based on the stars. False. No, no, no, no, no, no, for the 100th time over however many times the same article has been published. No, we'll get to that in a second.

But, but over 1000s of years, our view of the stars has shifted true. It has. But the problem is that zodiac signs were never based on the stars. This is the misunderstanding that exists at the heart of the same article that is published every couple of years, without fail, causing a lot of controversy, and a lot of people to, I don't know, look down their nose at astrologers from a position that's already decided astrology is BS in the first place.

And then these articles do nothing but reinforce the same ideas and thoughts and lack of critical thinking or lack of understanding about the history of astrology itself. That means, if you account for this shift, your sign might not be what you think, no, no and no below will tell you what it would be instead.

Well, I'm so glad we have you and your great expertise on the history of astrology and what astrology is. I don't mean to be so rude or cynical, but oh my god, is it frustrating, right, to have someone get it so wrong so many times, time after time after time.

All right? What I'm going to do next is, I'm just going to pull up an astronomy program and show you why this isn't true and how you can easily, you know, explain to friends or skeptics or family members whoever hear this story, you know what the background is.

So let's put an astronomy program up on the screen here. This is a program I use called Starry Night Pro. And what you're seeing here is the sun at about the spring equinox. It's at the Spring Equinox because the sun along that green line, which is called the ecliptic, is passing through the red line, which is the celestial equator. It's on the meridian, which means it's at about high noon on March 21 of 2025

so here's what I'm going to do for you next. I'm going to adjust this perspective just a little bit. And I'm going to explain to you what the Zodiac is and how it's actually measured.

For starters, remember the article said that the Zodiac is based on the stars, no what it is based on is the ecliptic. The ecliptic is this green path you see here, and what the ecliptic is is the path of the sun as it is seen from Earth, creating a 360 degree circle, ideally that maps a solar year.

The sun moves a little bit less than a degree through that zodiac, the great circle of the Zodiac a little less than a degree per day, which gives us 365 days a year, rather than a perfect 360 so it's an idealized mathematical, geometric circle of 360 days. That is our perception from Earth of the solar year.

And from that perspective, the sun is moving around us. Now we know astronomically, we're moving around the sun, but from the mythopoetic, symbolic perspective of astrology, we see the Zodiac as the great annual year of the sun. And the path of the Sun is this big circle of 360 degrees.

Now that circle mathematically broken into 30 degree segments, is the Zodiac that idealized 360 degree path of the Sun broken into 30 degree segments of a circle. Give you 1230 degree segments. Those are the 12 signs. They loosely correspond to the 12 mirroring moon cycles in a solar year.

Now there are 12 and change in a solar year. But again, this is an idealized symbolic system in the ancient world. And so the 1230 degree portions have nothing to do with the stars. That's the thing that these articles get so wrong. The 30 degree portions are not measured by constellations or stars. They just aren't.

Let me show you a little example. So let's let me move right here. I'm going to pull the sky a little bit, and I want you to notice, for example, look at how little Aries is. Look at how much space of that green line Taurus covers.

In no way is the constellation of Taurus the green line being the 360 degrees of the solar year. In no way is Aries covering the same amount of space as Taurus. You can see it with the naked eye.

And so what becomes really important for people to understand when they're starting to learn about the Zodiac and its history is that the constellations were not the way that planets moving through the ecliptic or the Zodiac, the path of the sun relative latitude above or below it were measured

instead the constellations served as loose celestial boundary markers of the mathematical portions of the circle, which means that the circle mathematically is how we measure the Zodiac and not the constellations. The constellations are just like loose, loose signs in the sky that were originally near the corresponding 30 degree segments of the circle, but they were not actually used to measure the zodiac.

And again, you can see right there, Aries doesn't cover the same amount of space as Taurus, but for 1000s of years, every sign carries the exact same amount of weight, so degree space wise, 30 degrees each.

So the constellations are just loose celestial boundary markers. They pre exist horroscopic astrology. They have mythological, ancient significance, religious significance that predates horoscopic astrology. But those 12 little constellations are of different sizes. Varying sizes are used to denote mathematical portions of an ideal circle.

The ideal circle broken into mathematical portions, is what the Zodiac is, not stars, not constellations. So that's part one.

Now the second thing is that the orientation of that circle that defines the sections Aries, Taurus, Gemini, like that, that orientation originally came from the fixed astronomical positions of the Sun at the equinoxes and solstices. Those are fixed, unchanging celestial rhythms.

So relatively speaking, you know, we're the sun is, it's always around March 20 in our calendar year, right that the sun is at the Spring Equinox, now, several 1000 years ago, when the Zodiac is being measured from Equinox to Solstice to Equinox to Solstice, broken into 30 degree segments, with those being the four major Cardinal turning points of the.

The zodiacal circle being cut into 30 degrees. The constellations in the sky relative to those 30 degree sections were Aries through Pisces in order, Spring Equinox. Aries roughly in that area. Next section Taurus, roughly in that area. Next section Gemini, roughly in that area of the mathematical circle.

But what astrologers realized early on in the tradition, as time went on, they began to observe that, oh, look, the constellations are very, very gradually drifting relative to these fixed points that define our zodiac.

The fixed points define our zodiac, the equinoxes and Solstices serve as the starting point of the zodiac and divvy up the 30 degree segments. However, the constellations that we have used as loose boundaries in the sky to describe those mathematical portions are drifting.

So then what happens is astrologers break into two camps with two different forms of zodiac. The zodiacs are still rooted in the equinoxes and solstices, not the stars. Nothing about the stars ends up measuring the zodiac.

However, the sidereal astrologers end up reorienting the Zodiac relative to the drifting meaning. They take into account the drifting of the constellations relative to the equinoxes and solstices, whereas in the tropical zodiac, the astrologer said, No, those constellations were never essential to the meanings of the Zodiacal portions, because the most central logic behind or within the 12 signs is what's happening in the solar year, the alternation of light dark, light and dark in 12 Steps from Aries or the spring equinox all the way back around through the summer solstice, the fall equinox, the winter solstice.

Every 30 degree segment of the solar year reflects a different kind of symbolic meaning, and that is what is is actually at the heart of a sign. The constellation has no real bearing on the sign other than mythopoetic associations that were drawn to this logic when they were originally sign markers in that area of the sky.

So tropical zodiac proponents say it doesn't matter where the constellation of Aries is, we can keep that original Association and in the meantime, continue to orient our zodiac. Aries always starts regardless of where that original RAM constellation is. Aries, the real Aries, is the spring equinox in 30 days forward. So give or take Taurus, regardless of where the bull is, is the next 30 degrees.

We'll keep those original names, but will also keep the original actual meanings of the Zodiac, which coincide with these 30 degree portions of a solar year. So we then have two zodiacs, one that's reorienting the equinoxes and Solstices to the drifting of the constellations, and one that sees the constellations original associations as peripheral and not really at the heart of the matter.

What's fascinating is that both of these zodiacs have been debated, used to great effect for 1000s of years, and largely astrologers have agreed that the orientation of the Zodiac through either the sidereal or the tropical perspective is about subjective and symbolic rationale, not objective causality.

In other words, so, in other words, what zo What if you choose to take a sidereal approach or a tropical approach? You'll hear a lot of astrologers saying, and especially any astrologers who've had any kind of meaningful readings from, say, Indian astrologers who use, you know, who use a sidereal zodiac, that they're all effective, you know, that's the thing that's so amazing about it, is that you can, I've had absolutely brilliant, wonderful readings from sidereal astrologers and from tropical astrologers to me, the difference is more like, you know, what, what type of deck are you using in the tarot, or what type of spread are you using in a Tarot reading, than it is about one being objectively true or false, regardless.

The point for the New York Times is very simple. The point for the New York Times is, guess what? Guys, I'm, I'm, I'm so sorry to break it to you. The Zodiac has never been rooted or measured by constellations. It has been measured by the fixed rhythms of the equinoxes and solstices, by the ecliptic, which is the idealized solar year circle of 360 degrees into 12 mathematical pores.

Portions, and it's just about how we're orienting the constellations relative to those mathematical portions. That has been, by the way, already a debated thing for 1000s of years among astrologers with two different schools and two different approaches.

Get real guys. You know, it's, it's so frustrating for me, because this article drops every couple of years, and it's just, I don't mean ignorant as in, well, I don't know, maybe it is willfully ignorant, but it's just ignorant in terms of actually knowing anything about the history of what they're talking about astronomically, or, you know, in terms of the cultural, religious context all gone.

So that's obviously, it's frustrating, but now, you know, and hopefully it's informative. So I want to get to the astrology of that day, because it's fascinating. But the second thing I want to show you is an attack on astrology that was made on the exact same day, September 7.

I was not surprised as this day was unfolding and I was getting bombarded with people being like, astrology is under attack. And I was like, of course, it is lunar eclipse and Jupiter sign. Let me show you what I mean here in a second.

So this is a social scientist named Adam Grant. Gotta love his first name. He's He's a brother from another mother. No, but I really don't mean any, you know, I mean no offense to this gentleman, because he's a social scientist that's operating from within a paradigm that has particular standards for research.

There's a model of how we know things, how we test things, that I think is completely legitimate. I'm not anti empiricism. I'm not anti science. However, I don't know that empiricism or the scientific method, or the approach to knowing that various scientists take is the only form of knowing, the only valid approach to truth or wisdom, and the only way that reality conveys truth about its own nature.

I'm not I'm not saying that it's invalid to be an empiricist or a scientist. I'm just saying I don't think it's the only way of coming to understand something about the nature of reality or or truth.

And I find that attacks like this typically occur more so because of astrologers having a hard time understanding what astrology is than other people. I'll say more about that in a second.

Here's what he said, another nail in the astrology coffin. 152 astrologers did no better than random chance at guessing people's charts from detailed info about them, astrologers helped design the test and quote experts failed at the same rate as novices. Horoscopes may be fun, but they ain't real.

Okay, so I wrote this in response, because a bunch of people tagged me were like, help. You know, someone's attacking astrology. I wrote this honestly. I was a little frustrated when I wrote it, but I said, No, people like this, and I'm not talking about Adam in particular, just people who think this way in general, aren't starting with an appropriate understanding of what astrology is, and so conversations become impossible.

Astrology is a form of divination, not a science, and until scientists take a real interest in the epistemology of divinatory traditions across the planet, they will continue to run silly tests and put nails in their own made up coffins.

I want to explain what I mean by that, but I also want to read this other comment that I made. I said, it doesn't help that 90% of its practitioners astrology also don't understand the philosophical epistemological roots of our own tradition, because those who do won't bite on stupid opportunities to test astrology.

Astrology, like all divination, resists empirical testing because it's oracular, not empirical until social science puts aside its own empirical dogma, it can't enter the paradigm enough to understand it.

So let me say a little bit more about this. The perspective that ancient astrologers are coming from was explored most famously by the scholar and astrologer Jeffrey Cornelius, in this book called The moment of astrology, origins and divination.

I had the opportunity to host Jeffrey thanks to a friend, Chris Odile, who sponsored him and his wife, Maggie Hyde, to come to the United States. And they came and visited, and thanks to this really synchronistic series of events that became a great support to me and many students and my school.

Well, Jeffrey came and visited, and for a week just blew our minds. He for a week, talked to us at length about the epistemological framework within which astrology is most likely situated in the ancient world, and what that means astrology is and isn't.

And he conveyed to us how important it is for astrologers to take the time to think about what astrology is, rather than jumping to quick conclusions or pat answers. And he also unpacked a lot of the history of the slow shift in orientation that astrologers have had, wherein astrology has gradually tried more and more and more to appeal to scientifically minded people and institutions, saying, please validate us as a empirical objective science, which has largely failed.

And he talks at length in this book, and he spoke with us and my students about why that fails, and what we can do about it. And this changed my life, and this is why, by the way, I'm leading that retreat called the Oracle within in Mexico next June.

It's a retreat that's designed to impart many of the exact same things that he did to me 12 years ago when Jupiter was lasting cancer. Think that's kind of interesting, but as an aside, so the ancient when we say epistemological, what we mean is the framework of like, how do we know something is true? How? How does something epistemology is sort of like a the study of how we can know something to be true or valid form of wisdom or knowledge or understanding.

And the epistemology of ancient astrology is decidedly not empirical. It grows out of what are called astral Omen traditions. And these traditions all take a view of life in the cosmos that, broadly speaking, is animistic and is shared by many indigenous traditions all across the planet that have other similar forms of divinatory systems or languages, the I Ching runes, turtle shells, liver entrails, the Tao and so Many other forms of divinity, tea leaves all over the world.

Divinatory traditions exist, and they largely share a similar outlook about the nature of reality. It's this outlook or understanding of reality that then facilitates how these forms of divination can exist or do exist.

So the basic framework is animism. Animism assumes that reality itself, the cosmos itself, let's call it, is alive, that it's a living being, and that it is sentient and divine, or sacred, intelligent and conscious.

And so the simplest way I know how to put it is that these ancient people look at the cosmos itself as a living, breathing animal with spiritual intelligence.

Therefore, what all of these wisdom traditions share in common are different symbolic languages, typically that the grammar, the diction, the syntax of these languages, exist in patterns, the patterns of a tortoise shell and how it cracks when it's heated, the patterns of the numerological manipulations of the each Ching, the patterns of the planets as they move around us from a geocentric, culturally encased view of the heavens, the the patterns found in the tea leaves.

Right? Most of these languages share in common that they look at patterns as a way of the cosmic animal or intelligence speaking personally, and that consciousness can speak specifically in just about any way, depending on how and why we approach it.

So let me give you a simple example that is animistic and divinatory in its perspective. Let's say you want to know, why did my grandfather have to die right now? You know, maybe your grandfather passed and you're, you're, you're having a deep contemplation of the why, excuse me, and let's say that as you are having that contemplation, you have a dream, and in the dream, your grandfather appears.

But maybe, you know, maybe it's some, some very bizarre setting, like I, I was in a jazz club in the 1940s and my grandfather was playing the trombone, and he didn't play trombone. Or, you know what? I mean, it'll be just something. So. Something really peculiar, and because of that unique showing of your grandfather in a dream in some bizarre context, you'll sit with it.

You'll sit with it, and then all of a sudden, let's say, in this particular case, an idea will pop into your head as you contemplate the image of your grandfather playing jazz trombone or whatever it is, you'll say, gosh, you know, my grandfather is about the least improvisational, spontaneous person ever.

It's interesting that I would see him doing something so creative after his death. It's interesting that I would see him doing something so off script, and something about that starts to settle into your heart. And it starts speaking in a way it's deeper than logic, and it starts speaking to you about the nature of death and what comes after death and life, and the juxtaposition of the maybe tightness that your grandfather held compared to the looseness with which he was playing right in the period of time where you're asking, why did he die?

It doesn't necessarily give you a logical, linear answer, but instead, the juxtaposition of images fills you with a kind of Gnosis, a kind of knowing that just says, Okay, there's something about the interplay of light and dark, life and death, life after death, where the soul goes, that's asking me right now to maybe just be more free and open and exploratory, rather than having to be so defined, just like my grandfather was, maybe his soul is playing in the next lifetime, or maybe my concern about the why is too tight, and I need to let life be more improvisational.

Do you see how suddenly that dream becomes like a jewel, and depending on how you turn it, it starts filling you with Gnosis, with knowing, with understanding, but not just one understanding, possibilities of understanding.

And so that dream, in that this sense is archetypal. And so on that level, some an image, an omen in a dream turned archetypally, has provided wisdom.

Now, every tradition on planet earth that has ever valued dreams as sacred, not just chemical interactions to be stripped away of meaning or meaning being mapped onto them in a reality that's objective, mechanistic, etc.

Any tradition that has a view of reality as sentient and alive, as the spirit, soul of a being and consciousness being primary, will look at that dream and that form of knowing that comes from the dream as a valid form of knowing, no better or worse, just a different way of knowing than testing and experimenting and manipulating objective, mechanistic things, right? It's just, it's just a different way of knowing. It's a different kind of truth. It's a different order of experience.

And to look down our nose at that and say, Oh, it's just subjective. That's really missing the point. You know that, in fact, to look down our nose and say that's just subjective is to betray an Objectivist, empiricist fanaticism and dogma.

So anyway, let's go now that that would be a way that one has consciously, unconsciously engaged with, let's call it the Oracle, with the divinatory component of reality that's in the human psyche, that's in nature itself, and has received guidance or knowing or wisdom.

But let's say now that there's something predictive, because clearly people will say, Well, that's nice, but what about prediction? Well, let's say that someone comes to me as a client and they say, Oh, I'm really nervous about my job. I'm not very happy with it, and I'm wondering if there will ever be a meaningful change at work.

I will use the Oracle, the symbolic patterns of a birth chart, like a dream image, just like a dream image. I'm taking the chart for this context, for this situation, all of my tools and techniques are about taking the images in this chart relative to the context that a person is bringing the concern about the job in the future.

All a psychic fact that this person is bringing a concern to please talk to me about this reality. There's an oracular approach. People that come to speak about this are assuming that reality has the power to speak through signs, omens, symbols, dreams, to their concern about the future. I.

And so what I do is I sit with a chart and I look at different patterns and images and themes, and I have different techniques that orient me to look in certain ways, in certain directions, for specific topics and context, future, present, past, job, sex, life, whatever.

At no time should I live under the illusion that there is some perfectly fatalistic, deterministic, hardcore science behind what I'm doing? But what I'll do is, I'll, I'll pull, I'll say, Oh, look, you know, in two years, Uranus is going to enter your 10th house of career in astrology, we would look at that as a omen of potential shake ups or changes with respect to the sphere of work.

And so can I say exactly what will happen? A person could get fired in two years. Person could find a new job in two years. A person could go back to school. In two years, a person could their company could get bought out. There's literally the usually, what astrologers can do with the signs, omens and symbols relative to a future inquiry is give themes, topics and timelines, and even those timelines are loose because of the way that astrological transits work.

The fact that we're able to do this is because the patterns of the heavens move through our perception of linear time and predictable patterns that it should be this way is, to my mind, just magical. I don't need to know why it just does.

And so I can say, well, in two years, this symbol appears here in this image, this chart, this like, it's like a painting, and at this time, this image will appear at this part of the painting. And that could very well along this timeline, around these particular dates and time windows coincide with these kinds of themes and events taking place, watch for them.

Now, as an astrologer, I know very well that what I am doing is astral Omen prediction, and the fact that I should be able to do this to me is probably due to things that we don't fully understand about the nature of time, that it that the past, present and future may exist in some ways, already in awareness of our in our psyches.

I don't know by what mechanisms it becomes possible that I should be able to look at signs, omens and symbols through patterns in the sky, and be able to make meaningful predictions about things that will happen.

I can tell you, I can almost never say exactly what will happen. It's themes, topics and timelines. But the ancient perspective of why this can happen is that reality has the power to speak to events in the past, present and future, as though they are all already contained in reality somehow, and the themes and symbols allow us to talk about them in ways that are not they're symbolic, not super super empirical and hard and fixed.

And so really good astrologers may have more of an ability to say very specific things about the symbols and make make predictions that are almost like prophetic or super, super specific. That is typically because of an intuitive gift, though, by and large, astrologers are the predictions that you make through the manipulation of signs, omens and symbols are going to be thematic.

The timelines will typically be accurate, the themes and topics will be accurate, but the specifics will be a question mark. For example, one thing, if you really wanted to test astrology, you wouldn't say this is the these are the characteristics of a person and match the chart, because context in a straw, like, just to put it simply, like there are so many different ways that symbols, that different qualities in a person, like I could, I could show you 75 different examples of addiction in a chart.

You know, I could show you 100 different examples of how someone who likes is good at engineering shows up in a chart. The fact that it is that way isn't just all that. That's because it's all confirmation bias. No, it's because astrology is not about saying things objectively. It's about being able to speak with a kind of symbolic accuracy given context that is brought to you.

It's the same as saying like you sit down with a tarot deck, and you typically don't go to a tarot deck and say, Tell me about myself objectively, because I'm going to test you as a deck That's so stupid. Like nobody does that you.

So instead, you go to a tarot deck, and you say, I'd love to gain more insight into the troubles I'm experiencing in my relationship. And I'd also love if you could say something about where it's all heading.

Then there's a type of spread you use with cards in certain symbolic positions, the past, the present, the future card positions, and you read those things and very magically, the cards can speak to the archetypal dynamics of the situation, because they're, they're they're brought in and given the chance to speak as symbols.

The symbols become like voices that contribute their perspective to the situation. And our ability to bring that in meaningfully is crucial because it's a relationship, it's a it's a conversation.

So anyway, the simple point behind all of this is that astrology is a form of oracular, divinatory consciousness that looks at reality as sentient, alive and communicating with us, in that sense, trying to objectify astrology will always fail, because what? What the feedback that you're actually getting when you try to test astrology and prove it empirically or verify it objectively?

The failure isn't so much a failure of astrology as much as it is a failure of understanding astrology as an objective, mechanistic system, all failing tests for astrologers are typically the cosmos saying, that's not what I am, that's not what this is, that's not what reality is, and that's not what truth is.

And so the failure is more a commentary on the test and the testing and the assumptions than it is about the nature of astrology. If you want to know what astrology is, have a conversation with an Oracle. Have a conversation with an Oracle through a sensitive astrologer who understands the nature of astrology, especially that becomes very, very important in the same way that if you want to have someone really meaningfully help you connect to a dream image, you talk to a really sensitive, you know, therapist who has a lot of work with Dream image.

It's not, it's not that complicated. The reason that these tests fail is because, well, we got 150 astrologers to help us build the test. I bet you none of them understood the nature of astrology epistemologically. Do you know you know what I mean?

So anyway, I wrote this on social media, and I just want to share with you this, and then we're going to go into the astrology said. Astrology doesn't need defending and it doesn't need proving. Say it three times aloud. It's kind of having fun here, but here's what I want to say.

I think astrology starts with the recognition that reality is oracular. Now, if that's a faith statement, and you're like, Look, I can't get down with that, that's a faith statement that I just I can't agree to, then fine, I don't. I really don't see it as a problem.

I think that if you do astrology long enough, it is because you have this faith, or because this faith comes into you by virtue of doing it. Reality is oracular. In other words, reality is sentient, alive, conscious, communicative, relational.

All threats that seem like they are aimed at an oracular tradition are actually better understood as omens and signs themselves. This is the advice I give to anyone. When you see these attacks, don't worry about trying to prove astrology.

Instead, look at the timing of the attacks and learn about them as the voice of the Oracle itself speaking. That's our tradition. Listen to detractors as though they are riddles from the Oracle and sit with them.

A bird can be a bird and or a bird can be a messenger or a message. When I hear detractors telling me I need to prove astrology is real, that it needs to be tested, I go deep within and I hear the voice of the Oracle. Its voice says, Actually, I am testing you to which I say to the Oracle, thank you.

Now, please let my silence. In other words, please let my my silence in the way of not trying to prove astrology be the proof of my love. Let my silence be the proof required by your testing.

And so to astrology detractors, I say nothing, nothing, at least in terms of let me try to prove this to you, because I know that this response is the exact proof required of me by the Oracle's always poetic testing, and it is our ability to not take the bait in these situations that deepens our connection with the Oracle.

And your intuitive capacity as a diviner grows as you are able to see this as a testing from the Oracle to you as a person, from a personal reality, as opposed to a test to prove reality in some objectifying scheme.

And I can even see astrology detractors. Is a kind of astral Omen recurring in strange cycles just as often as the New York Times publishes the same old story saying the Zodiac has changed, or another group of astrologers has failed a scientist test.

So I will leave it there. Now, what I want to do for fun is show you just how astrological our language allows for a moment like this to be I'm not making it up when I say that this is the voice of the Oracle itself speaking when these kinds of things happen on the same day.

And there's two big public attacks on astrology made, let's look at the astrology of that day. Let's use our language to hear the Oracle speak on the day of the lunar eclipse. Here is what I want to point out.

The lunar eclipse was in the sign of Pisces, and it was with a forming opposition to Mercury. The lunar eclipse in the sign of Pisces is ruled by Jupiter, which means that one of the things, first of all, remember lunar eclipse symbolism in general, for 1000s of years, has meant that the potential for one of The great meanings of eclipses, authority figures, lights, luminaries will come to be eclipsed.

That can mean assassination, that can mean death, that can mean eclipsing, as in one form of government is replacing another, so but recurring symbolism, death of mother or father as leaders of the family. The eclipsing of the luminaries, the big lights in the sky, has often been associated with pillars of light in society, institutions, leaders, etc, etc, being eclipsed.

There's many other meanings of lunar eclipses, of course, but that's one of the staples of solar and lunar eclipses. For 1000s of years, forms of social, civic leadership, institutionally, personally get eclipsed.

Now what I want to show you is here we have the potential, specifically with a lunar eclipse in a Jupiter ruled sign for something jupiterian to be eclipsed. Jupiter is the natural ruler of all of the institutions of a society that are meant to uphold cosmic order and to bring that cosmic order, in a sense of a cohesive Cosmos into human society.

So institutions of education, government, legal systems, churches and religions, systems of morality, the sciences, all of these things that are supposed to be enlightening, illuminating, providing of sanity, health, well, being coherent. Societally, Law and Order societally, these are all Jupiter, not surprisingly, one of the great jupiterian institutions, frequently associated with the sign of Pisces, is religion, religion, and specifically with the Jupiter ruled feminine Pisces, the intuitive, otherworldly, mystical side of religion, is long been associated with the feminine ruled Jupiter sign of Pisces.

So we have an eclipsing of one of our mystical spiritual traditions in astrology. We have something like an assassination attempt, not surprisingly, just days after this, an ideological, you know, activist on the right is also murdered.

That's Charlie Kirk. I'm not here to, you know, offer any kinds of thoughts about that, because there's been so much about that. But the point astrologically, is similar. Thought Leaders, ideological leaders, religious institutions, right? The attack upon figures who represent forms of wisdom or knowledge or political perspectives. That's the Jupiter ruled part of the eclipse. Okay?

Now what I want you to notice specifically is the eclipse is ruled by Jupiter and cancer. And what was taking place in the sky, Mars, the god of war, assaults, attack, is forming a square with Jupiter.

So not only is the potential for religious institutions, lawmakers, governments, all the jupiterian kinds of things to potentially be eclipsed or changed or transformed or attacked or assaulted, all again, Eclipse symbolism and Jupiter symbolism.

But we have the god of war and conflict and aggression and hostility squaring the Jupiter in the sky that rules the Eclipse a. The day that astrology is attacked by social scientists the New York Times, very public and just not, not too long after, we have a thought leader on the right wing being shot in broad daylight, right so the attack on forms of thought or religion or whatever it is, that's what the signature in the sky was at the time of the eclipse.

Now, when an empiricist hears me saying this, they think that what I'm saying is that these symbols caused those things to happen, and then they want to test it by using the same symbols and their patterns to predict things.

And the answer to that is, no, that's not how it works, and that's not what's going on. The way this works. I mean, sure you I mean, like, if you look at my Mars Jupiter square video, you'll see that one of the things that I talked about leading up to the Eclipse with Mars square Jupiter were ideological conflicts that are driven by, I'm right, you're wrong.

Let's battle over it so we can look at architect. But could I specifically take that and go, Oh yeah, well, astrology will be attacked, or a politician will be murdered, or, typically not. I mean, you could guess those things, but it's not that the astrologer sits there and says, Well, my science perfectly predicts it.

No, it's that these meaningful patterns of signs and omens have an internal logic that can be used to understand things and patterns that are in the process of unfolding. But this is looked at as more of a mirror of things symbolically than it is a causal machine.

The fact that we have a mirror in the sky that can be looked at, you know, that I can, I could look at the mirror in the sky and what will be in it and how it will be configured in 10 years from now, that's remarkable, but I attribute that remarkableness to something about the nature of reality or the human psyche itself that we should be thinking more about.

I don't know exactly, you know, how or why we should be able to do these things, but we can. That's the point. And, you know, I don't need any proof at this point of anything, because, you know, I've there's, it's like, you know, I've seen 15,000 clients, and I've seen this language have the power to guide, instruct, describe, predict, in a million ways, and sometimes just so profoundly specific, and other time very reliably, archetypally consistent.

So let me give you a simple example. I had knowledge that this eclipse on this day would be coinciding. The Eclipse would be coinciding with my younger daughter's moon in her birth chart in Pisces.

So the eclipsing Moon in Pisces would come right over her moon, and during the afternoon, as the Eclipse was taking place on Sunday, September 7, her she fostered a bunny, and the bunny died, and so her Eclipse, afternoon, with the Eclipse right on her moon, was spent mourning the loss of her bunny, and it was the first time in my No, she's seven, first time in her life that I heard her asking some really deep questions about existence, reality, death, right? Faith, questions of faith.

It's a Jupiter ruled Eclipse over her moon. Her little emotional body is processing death and loss now, two weeks before my wife said, is the eclipse is going to hit anyone in our family hardness? Yeah, it's going to hit summer pretty hard. That's my daughter. You know, it's going to hit her chart in a in a pretty significant way.

What do you think will happen? I said, I don't know. It's, it's hard to say the body, the health, the mother, the moon. Those are symbol. That's a symbol in my daughter's chart that could convey a lot of different things when it comes to being eclipsed.

And so I talked about a number of different possibilities. None of them included the death of the rabbit. But when the death of the rabbit occurred during the eclipse window, and it was right on her moon. And my wife and I had had the conversation several weeks previous that it was going to hit her moon. It was not surprising at all.

And that on that level astrology's predictive capacity is that's typically the level at which it's working. I could say I could look at an astrological phenomenon, and I could look at a number of different charts, and I could look at which charts receiving that phenomenon in very acute ways, are likely to experience more acute events along specific timelines.

But even then, what I can usually say is going to be symbolic, archetypal, a realm of interconnected themes and topics.

Six anyway, so I think it's fascinating to look at these things and to learn from them. Right? Those assaults on astrology were taking place at a time where a kind of ideological violence was being displayed in the symbols of the planets, and that that I'm going to attack a view that I don't like or I don't agree with is very much contained in a Mars square Jupiter with Jupiter ruling the Eclipse, you know, lunar eclipse, and a Jupiter ruled sign, which includes attacks on faith based traditions and other things like that.

So yeah, I hope that this was interesting. I know it was a long episode, but I think a worthwhile conversation to try to dig into. So yeah, I'll leave it here for now. I hope you're having a great weekend and that you enjoy these little bonus episodes, and whatever you do.

My encouragement to you is not to try to prove astrology, but also don't, don't, you know, don't be rude or mean or, you know, my frustration with people who have these attacks on astrology does not mean that I think they should be treated as people any differently.

You know, we should try to have conversation and dialog, and this is the way, this is what I would want people to try to understand who don't understand astrology. So all right, take it easy, everyone. Bye, bye.