Mercury Opposite Neptune: Speaking with Spirits

Hey everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology. Today, we are going to take a look at Mercury's opposition to Neptune. Of course, Mercury is also trining Uranus, trining Pluto, and opposing Neptune, so it is configured to all of the outer planets simultaneously.

Today, I would like to share this with you. I'm going to read to you a brief essay and riff on it as we go. This is an essay that was written by, uh, it was actually a talk, the transcription of a talk, I should say, that was given by Jeffrey Cornelius, who is one of the astrologers that has had a tremendous impact and influence on my career and my trajectory.

He recently passed away, and so I want to do this to kind of offer him a tribute and also give you a sense of what his ideas were and why he's so important to the history of astrology in the modern era, especially and then tell you how you can read more if you can learn more.

A lot of what he has to say in this essay is just a totally perfect picture, as well as the archetypes that Mercury is activating right now, especially the opposition to Neptune. We're going to talk about what divination is, and I think that you'll enjoy this. So that's what we're doing for today.

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Okay, on that note, let us now turn our attention to the real-time clock, where we are going to just point out what Mercury is doing and the timeline that Mercury provides us. And then, I am going to read you this brief essay, which is a transcription of a talk that Jeffrey Cornelius gave on the subject of divination. I'll also tell you why I think we ought to be paying attention to this right now because it's a very appropriate topic for Mercury's opposition to Neptune, which, among other things, can represent things like divination, speaking with spirits, talking to oracles, getting gathering meaning from signs.

So anyway, here is the real-time clock, and what we're looking at here in the middle of the week is Tuesday. We can see here that Mercury is coming into a trine with Uranus and is then going to go through an opposition to Neptune and then a trine to Pluto. So we see those three aspects play out between today, Tuesday, September 24, tomorrow, September 25, and then by Thursday, September 26, those aspects have passed over. So we really are talking about a kind of a window between Tuesday and Wednesday into Thursday. So, the middle chunk of this week is a very busy time for Mercury.

Now, we could go on about all of the different manifestations of Mercury through all three of those placements. But I want to focus on the opposition to Neptune. One of the things that Mercury-Neptune oppositions bring up is things like the rational mind versus the intuitive experience, psychic reality versus, you know. Intellectual reality is not that they're not that they have to be opposed, but they often are. People with rational, skeptical, inquiring minds want to know, you know, how something like astrology works and why we shouldn't think of it as BS. You know what I mean?

For example, when you put Mercury against Neptune, you often have experiences that cannot be explained rationally, or you have experiences of deception or illusion or intoxication that we have to remain vigilant, discerning, and skeptical of so that we stay grounded. So you get that dichotomy coming up pretty strongly with Mercury and an earth sign like Virgo opposite Neptune in a water sign like Pisces emotionality and our need to capture or contain emotions with rigorous, grounded, practical, logical ideas and thoughts and constructs.

On the other hand, there is a need for the rational mind to be overwhelmed by things that are non-ordinary and emotional. So, these tensions are in the air right now, and what I want to do is talk particularly about one of the great, great Mercury Neptune subjects, which is divination. Astrology grows out of astral Omen traditions in the ancient world, which means that it comes from traditions and practices from all around the ancient world: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Babylon, India, Greece, and so forth.

Frankly, all around the world, outside of this particular region too, and indigenous traditions and cultures all over the place, South Central America, sub-Saharan Africa, Australia, looking at phenomenon in the sky and believe that just like animals can act as signs, dream images can act as signs or omens or portents, that so can celestial phenomenon. It is easy to think that because there is a kind of geometry, math, and astronomy at play in the patterns of the sky, it makes the patterns of the sky evidence of some kind of mechanical system that we're living in.

But most ancient astrologers actually began with the idea that these patterns are meaningful symbols and meaningful symbols to be understood as symbols like any other. So, for example, you know, when we draw a tarot card, let's say you draw the death card.

It's kind of a classic, and someone in your life, let's say a grandparent, passes away soon after a meaningful reading from which you drew the death card. Nobody makes the mistake of thinking that the tarot cards are the evidence of some kind of mechanic that is at work causing the death to happen. Right? Because we read the card as an omen, as a sign.

We use Tarot in an oracular, divinatory manner. But this is actually where astrology begins. Astrology begins with the same kind of mindset that even though the patterns in the sky have a kind of mathematical precision behind them, those patterns are a language of omens and signs. So I want to read you now, and the reason that that's important is because what it says about the nature of astrology is that the meaningful application of those patterns and signs to the specific context or reason that we are approaching the Oracle of the sky will always rest on the sensitive, artistic, intuitive ability to interpret and articulate those signs on the part of a diviner, an astrologer whose language is a kind of Mytho, poetic, hermeneutic, right?

We're interpreters, but we are readers, right? We're reading a language, and the way we articulate that language in order to help someone make sense of signs or symbols is really no different than the way that a good tarot reader can pluck from the symbols in a spread in the positions of the cards in the spread, value, and meaning that can speak that allows the spirits to speak through the cards you might say, or that allows the Oracle or the universe or the person's guides, or however you want to conceptualize it, that the meaningful rendering of those symbols and elements of those symbols on the part of the diviner is it happens because the diviner has a relationship, a living relationship with the Oracle and with the symbols.

So, it's not just a mechanical science. It's not just a mechanical Cosmos where all of these influences are causing things to happen. We don't think about it that way. We think about it as like a moving language in the sky, like a rotating tarot deck in the sky. That has so many different relative applications and meanings depending on the consciousness of the diviner, the relationship of the diviner with the symbols in the Oracle, and the context that is brought to the Oracle. See, all of this is very Mercury Neptune.

All of this suggests the synthesis of a system of symbols that is meaningful and logical, that's rational, comprehensible, and philosophical but is also ultimately subjective, relational, artistic, and intuitive in the application that is context-based. We make the mistake of thinking when we look at a birth chart that is me.

The birth chart represents something objectively true about me. What we don't realize is that a birth chart will actually speak differently, and the symbols will speak in radically different ways, depending on why we're approaching it, how we're approaching it, for what reasons, what topics at what time in our life, with what problems, with what reflections we bring, and with who we bring into the reading with us, if it's just ourselves, if we have a reader with us, that means that the birth chart is more like a Mantic device that we have.

It's like a kind of compass. It's not who you are. You're not your chart. You're a soul. You're a deeply mysterious being who is having experiences that you can reflect upon using this device that is oriented at the time you appeared in a body. But it's not you; it's not who you are. Who you are is a deep mystery that is in the process of unfolding infinitely. Right? So, we have to remember that divination comes from that kind of persevering maintenance of mystery. It's like, No, I'm not going to fall into the trap of personality tests, you know what I mean, or of getting conflated as a soul with symbols. Symbols and archetypes are not souls, right? I'm a soul. I'm not an archetype, is what I mean.

Okay, that's a little setup. I want to read this essay to you now, and I hope that it will be meaningful to you. This article is based on the United Astrology Congress lecture that was given on May 22, 1998, and it was first published in The Mountain Astrologer issue number 81 November of 1998 and I found this on the interwebs, and Jeffrey was a great proponent of helping people maintain and develop this kind of sensitive, divinatory understanding of what we're doing as astrologers.

My subject today, and as I go, I'm going to pause and just offer my own reflections, but I really want to share something of his work with those of you who maybe don't know him and might also be interested in reading his major text, which I'll share with you after we go through this on how you can get a hold of it. My subject today is the subtle question of whether astrology is divination. I assume most of you saw Thomas Moore give the keynote address yesterday; Moore surprised many in the audience when he expressed praise for the divinatory aspect of astrology.

He said that astrologers should realize that we are divine and should not proceed in the direction of using astrology as a type of reading or inference from cosmic influences, perhaps only some with some distance from astrology, someone who loves its symbols but isn't a horoscopic artist is able to see our practice clearly.

Many of us, however, do not like the suggestion of divination because that would undermine the objectivity of our practice. In my view, it's that very objectification of the experience of astrology that binds us and blinds us. Divination is a word that is often loosely used to mean a type of intuition. The highest process of what we do in any art or science involves this wonderful intuitive capacity.

Put that way, we could all agree, fine, astrology is divination, but my purpose here today is to raise the so what you might not like some of the things I have to say this is still useful because it's important that you think this through and are able to say why you don't like it, then we'll get more clarity on the nature of our astrology. I came into astrology directly through the I Ching in a love of divination.

I had, therefore, already come up with a particular attitude toward the practice of astrology, viewing it within the context of other divinatory practices. That means I was already comparing the horoscope with the random cut of the tarot deck, the throw of the coins, or the division of the Yarrow stocks. For many people, however, astrology is the first form of symbolic thinking they have explored, making their experience somewhat different.

For them, astrology seems to be evidence of a universal and impersonal pattern at work at all times and places, lawful and not random at all, and certainly not in any way dependent on a diviner's decision to take a divination. Because of my avid interest in divination and symbol systems, in my early years in astrology, I eagerly attended astrology lectures and read astrology books for illumination on the topic; lecture after lecture and book after book, I almost never encountered the word divination.

In relation to astrology, except in the general sense already mentioned that astrology allows us to intuit some higher reality, but never in the sense that the formal practice of astrology, its methods, techniques, and its mode of interpretation, is a divinatory system that can be studied in the light of what we know about the I-Ching, Tarot, tea leaves, that whole gamut of practices called divination.

It is my understanding that the core of our practice has omen reading at its origins; astral Omen reading goes back at least to the civilization of Mesopotamia to a truly archaic mode of consciousness that observed the omen as significant. This idea is intimately bound up with the ancient conception that the whole universe is filled with spiritual beings and intelligence of all grades and levels, both close to us and far from us.

These conceptions have come from societies with the polytheistic and pagan understanding that the planets, the stars, and all things of nature are innately divine. The work of the diviner and the Stargazer is too divine to know the will or movement of these spirit beings and how they relate to us. In what way does the diviner know these things? He or she seeks a showing a sign given by the God or spirit and addressed directly to the diviner or to the tribe or nation for whom the diviner divines note the word directly the God or spirit speaks in the first person and addresses the one who divines thou, the God, responds to our concern and our desire and to our question and speaks to us through the omen.

This is the root and origin of what we astrologers and I want to say something here. It's easy to think that when we're listening to a channel like this, and we're reporting on transits that we could plot out a year in advance, that means that there is something objectively and mechanically occurring, some system of causes and influences. The way I conceive of what I am doing is not at all like that. I conceive whatever you may, wherever you may be coming from, is fine, by the way.

I just think it's interesting to hear this perspective if you've never heard it before and consider whether you're not trying to indoctrinate anyone; whatever you think is fine, but the way that I conceive of what I'm doing is I am presenting signs and omens that are passing through, and those signs and omens that are passing through, and the reason that I constantly turn the jewel of those signs and omens in different directions is because I know that the light bouncing off the jewel in the different directions as these signs and omens are passing through will speak to you who are listening.

It is my job to be an artful, intuitive diviner of these signs and omens because I know that they will speak to you and that you will be able to gather meaning, Intuit advice, understand direction, or even just see the symbolism manifest in unexpected ways, and then trust at some deeper level that your experience is being informed or shaped by divine influence. But I don't see the signs and omens as some kind of objective system of weather or energies or something like that. They can reflect or signify things that we experience and call energetic, but I see what I'm doing very much as reading something like a moving tarot deck in the sky.

It's important because that leaves us open to speaking with and relating to these in a personal, relational manner, these omens and science, rather than thinking about them as objective things that we have to use or avoid or plan for remediate or that they represent some kind of objective thing that's there. Nobody thinks about images and dreams that way for the most part, or images in the Tarot or the I Ching and other forms of divination are not usually thought of that way because we get captured by the apparent objectivity of astronomy. But it's an apparent objectivity.

Music has apparent objectivity because it's sensible. But nobody makes the mistake of thinking that the way that music speaks to you is, in some ways, purely objective, right? So let's keep going.

When relocated in the context of the classical model of astrology, the I, thou dialog of the omen is lost. The later construction of astrology establishes an abstracted, universal, and rationalized model of heavenly influences in place of the chaotic and intimate showing of an omen here and now; I suggest that in this move of abstraction, something absolutely essential about the practice of astrology is overlaid and forgotten.

Forgetting it leads to a conceptual and spiritual void. I have felt, for many years, that there is a hollowness at the heart of this practice of astrology that I love and that I think is so revealing. I have friends who have taken the vows of Buddhist Dharma and friends who seriously practice Christianity and mysticism, and they ask the question genuinely and earnestly, to what good is the. Practice of yours. Why are you doing this? It's a very challenging question in the whole history of Western astrology; I believe it has not been adequately addressed or answered.

The question of the spiritual nature of astrology, of believing that we may relate ourselves to something called divine, is brushed aside in our classical tradition early on in the attack of the church fathers against all forms of paganism; astrologers soon learned that they should not directly say that their art gave them knowledge of supernatural things.

An astrologer in Islamic or Christian culture was under immediate pain of heresy and perhaps death. The fact that what we do may be supernatural and involve gods or spirits is simply not an allowable thought in the classical tradition of astrology; it can't be an allowable thought in the face of the overwhelming power of both monotheism and the rational philosophy of the Greeks. There is no place for an old Astrology of Omen reading, with its oracles and its connection with augury and lots.

There's only room for a rationalized Astrology of spiritual influences that work on the seeds of things at the birth moment, a type of spiritual, scientific causation. This is the great model given to us from Ptolemy onward. It is the model sustained through Islamic astrology and in the whole western tradition.

Intelligent critics of astrology maintain that astrologers have always managed to use the prevailing culture and ethos of the times in which they live, as well as the science and philosophy of their period, to disguise themselves and cunningly continue with their practice. This is absolutely true, and this is our big, dirty secret, guys. I'll say more about that in a second.

We disguised ourselves as Aristotelian science for the better part of two millennia; then we tacked ourselves onto modern science in the revival of two centuries ago when astrology disguised itself as magnetism and electricity and later as radio waves. Depth psychology is just the latest disguise. Perhaps we can do nothing else, for how can this form of symbolism survive without being in the corrupt position of lying about itself in some way in order to get by? This is something the occultists have always known. One does not speak about certain things.

So I want to mention that this is something that I strive in all of my classes, in the way that I teach astrology to, in a sense, advocate for, you know, I don't have a ton of soap boxes, and I tend to get softer, and my edges get worn down over time, and I get have developed more of a live and let live attitude as I've grown more mature, I think.

But one thing that I feel quite strongly about is that what we are doing is a form of living relational dialog with signs and omens and in order to legitimate ourselves as doing something else because it sounds weird to say that I believe that there is a living system of signs and omens moving about the sky, and I read and Intuit and artfully interpret that language for the sake of description and prediction for people based on what they want to talk about in a reading that makes me a kind of hermeneutic, like a hermetic psychic.

It may, and it's like to describe ourselves that way seems like what we're it almost sounds like what we're saying is that there's nothing objective about what's going on here, and I think that it is actually far more nuanced, and difficult to describe than that. No, we're not just intuitively reading signs and symbols willy-nilly.

When we study astrology, we are learning astrologia, astrologos. There is a philosophy behind our craft and our language, and that is accompanied by an artful and intuitive rendering of the signs and symbols as they appear in the relational context of a reading. It is our work to be in that space to articulate something. And you know when you're doing it because your hair stands up on end. But that's divination, and anyone who's really done astrology knows because you end up feeling like your use of rules and tools that you've learned, your use of craft, is always partial and not complete.

It is always at play, but it is just as important that you deviate from rules through the use of your intuition in very specific contexts that you read assemble one way here and another way there, depending on the context, and you always feel, on some level, like you're breaking the rules. But this is at the heart of divination.

So this is why, ultimately, what we're doing, it is not best to think of as mechanical, as a strict science, that if you just read the tools and rules rationally and objectively, you will present some kind of objective astrology or objective answers and so forth. That's not really how astrology works.

So anyway, he says, we usually try to forget about the critics and just get on with our astrology. This is understandable, yet our opponents are truly educational for us. One of the greatest attacks on astrology happened about 500 years ago in late 15th century Italy, when Marcio Ficino, a superb astrologer himself, and his pupil, Pico del Mirandola, dubbed by his friends as the most learned man of his age, laughed at the astrologers of Florence, the quote, petty ogres, who believed that through their oracles, they had the power from the heaven to define man's fate. Pico's disputations against divinatory astrology.

1493 to 94, became the model for other decisive attacks well into the 17th century. It marks a turning point in the historical decline of astrology. These Renaissance music magicians have been called humanists because they loathed any form of determinism, including, above all, the determinism of the stars, which could demean the dignity and freedom of the human soul.

They practiced magic in the true sense of the word, the magic of imagery, invocation, Kabbalah, and Christianity itself; at that point in our history, the imaginative consciousness called magic and the craft of horoscope judgments parted company at the same time, Pico easily deconstructed the false rationale derived from Aristotle and Ptolemy underpinning astrology's theory.

So what appears at first to be a rupture between astrology and magical religious Renaissance humanism turns out at one and the same time to be the rupture between astrology and science and foreshadows the near terminal decline of our art that was to come in the scientific enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. After pico craft and horoscopy, I never had a serious intellectual case. It is important for us to understand that this attack from magicians and Symbolists was a protest against the crass, materialistic doctrines of astrologers of their day. And where does that materialism come from? In my opinion, it comes from the false, pseudo-causal, pseudo-rational structure that astrology has.

Astrologers have long adopted to disguise their art. We're tarot readers, bitches, I'm just playing. So, where do we now stand on the question of astrology as science? It seems to me that in recent times, and certainly in the US, our pursuit of scientific credibility for astrology has gone on the back burner. It was big a few years back, mainly because of Gauquelin's work, but we seem to have been backing off from it.

Now, it is not my intention to speak against scientific research, but I don't see that it has much to offer. Astrology, our practice, is not rooted in observations that are pertinent to the science of our age. That's why most astrologers are completely unmoved by the results of all the research findings and statistics. I once had the good fortune, temerity, or stupidity to speak with Paul Kurtz, one of the key individuals responsible for the tremendous attack on astrology that was published in 1975 in the American Journal.

The humanist managed to trap him by a coffee machine during a skeptics conference in London. The poor man was trying to get coffee out of the dispenser, and I said, I'm an astrologer. Nice to meet you. Now, look, I know it worries someone like you when an astrologer makes scientific claims, but if an astrologer were to say to you that what we do is a poetic interpretation of the patterns of the heavens, what would you say? He said, That would be fine, just fine. And went back to his coffee.

So Paul Kurtz and the Nobel Prize winners who proclaimed against astrology wouldn't care a damn if we said we were doing poetic astronomy. They have a problem when astrologers lay claim to the whole edifice and understanding of scientific thought and its power, using it as the basis for how astrology works. I don't blame Paul Kurtz for seeing red. Perhaps we astrologers have our wires crossed more than they have; if we continue to present our subject to them so poorly, we can expect these attacks in return. It's our karma, not theirs.

When there is an attack on astrology, it is particularly important that we realize what we ourselves are saying about our subject rather than complaining about the stupidity of those people who attack us. Yes, I so agree with that. It's like what we need to do is really bring back meaningful conversations about the fact that humans have paid attention. Humans believe in the reality of destiny, and humans have paid attention to signs and omens and had relationships with oracles, whether it's dreams or animals in nature, tarot cards, tea leaves, the I-Ching or astrology or even flipping open a random page of the Bible.

People have long believed that signs and omens serve as a kind of conduit for conversation with the spirit, with beings, or with Gods. Or goddesses or higher intelligence, whatever you want to call it, people have always, like the majority of people, actually believed that there is this special category of knowing that is relational, that honors consciousness, that Honors Living beings as a part of a living universe, not an objective machine.

And that kind of knowing, that relational form of knowing through signs, patterns, omens, symbols, 11:11, on your freaking clock, that there is something to that, that it constitutes a way of knowing, and that way of knowing we could call divinatory symbolic. The whole reason that depth psychology is so popular is because depth psychology, at its core, acknowledges and brings in that mode of knowing when it comes to psychological development.

This is why depth psychology is riddled with Gods and Goddesses and myths and metaphors and films and fiction poetry. So the problem is that we keep trying to present what we know in the mode of knowing that we experience in astrology as something other than what it is; we should be proud that this is a feature of our universe, not scared that it doesn't fit into someone else's model of what truth is.

There are many modes of truth when there is an attack on astrology; it is particularly important that we realize what we are saying about our subject rather than complaining about the stupidity of those people who attack us. And I don't think we give a straight answer about what we do; it is disingenuous of astrologers to even hint at a scientific basis of the sort understood in physics or biology.

We'd be on so much stronger ground if we said what we do is a type of symbolic imagination; we believe it has real effect and real results. This is something you psychologists and parapsychologists ought to take a look at. What we do is actually about the remarkable powers of human imagination that imply something very extraordinary about the nature of reality and the nature of the mind.

Yes, church, I believe this is something worthy of true science and true study. Otherwise, we hang ourselves up on divides and false battles. Exactly what we should really be doing is saying, this is divination, and let's study and talk about divination as a mode of knowing. We do. We believe that music or poetry or art doesn't have real evocative power. It has so much power. It has the power to predict, to describe.

Art has been doing things in the human imagination, soul, and civilization that have effective, active power. It's not abstract, just living in some separate fantasy world; the symbols and icons of religion and religious participation, art and music, and all of these things are a real part of how we know what is real. They might be highly subjective, but does that mean we're not going to touch them?

Is science only as good as how you can describe what a book is made of, and not the contents and the meaning, right? I'm not saying that everyone has this view of science. I think that there are actually a lot of really brave, interesting, new kinds of science being done as well, but that's what he's talking about.

There can be no doubt that, strangely and mysteriously, there is some type of response in the universe captured in the old doctrine of correspondences that is worthy of a spiritual scientific endeavor or a science of the future. Equally, phenomenon such as those produced by Gauquelin cannot be pushed aside. He was a man who did a study, or statistical study on astrology that yielded some interesting results.

They definitely belong in the strange realm that is challenging at the corners of science. There's no reason for us astrologers to turn away from them, but there is no reason to claim them as the basis of our practice. There's the rub, given the paradoxes of our current understanding, I suggest we need to take on a double conception, a division of significance in astrology into two orders, which I have termed respectively natural and divinatory astrology.

By divinatory astrology, I mean much the same as the old term judicial astrology, meaning the art of particular judgments, especially from the horoscope. Yes, astrology does have a physical and objective presence, an occult mystery of the natural order of things. It has some objective phenomenon. They're amenable even to our present-day science. All of this belongs to an astrology of nature.

But when you or I judge a horoscope, our judgment isn't based on those components or categories. It's quite possible for something to have a genuine physical reference and connection to a mysteriously organized universe in the way that astrologers over millennia have discovered, and at the same time, for each act of horoscope interpretation to be a very purely subjective and imaginative creation. It is possible for both to exist together.

When he says an imaginative creation, he doesn't mean it is fiction. He's talking about that imaginative act of pulling things from symbols and planets and houses and signs that can predict as well as describe the unfolding of events, but we are able to intuit how to use them, when to use them, how to articulate them because there is an imaginative act going on within the context of a reading. It's like a lightning rod that's being tapped. Let's consider another divinatory form as an example.

If you know the I-Ching, the Book of Changes, you know it works. It offers, in its own way, an objective truth. The I Ching is based on trigrams that have natural affinities of wind, water, and wood. When you make a divination with the I Ching by manipulating the trigrams with their references to the natural world, it doesn't depend on any objective truth that you already know about the nature of wind, water, or wood.

These are images drawn from nature with a genuine role in nature that can be studied, yet we can immediately use these images in the act of creation to construct and see and reveal a meaning about a situation; they don't depend on any literal wood or literal wind. When dealing with other symbol systems, it's very obvious that we don't have to be literal, but we astrologers, despite all protests to the contrary, are so damned literal about it, and our literalness lies not in the beauty of the interpretations of planets, signs, and houses, but in the most basic fact of all, where we get the moment of astrology from I refer to the birth moment, but I'll come back to this shortly.

I'd like to follow Jung a little further on the implications of seeing our practical astrology as divination. I'll do this by taking up the idea of astrology as a metaphoric mirror. I'm sure many modern astrologers would agree that the whole system of stars and planets is an elaborate metaphor or allegory by which to describe another situation in reality.

We bring these mirrors of symbols to a situation, read in the mirror, and then infer back to the actual reality. This is one way to describe divinatory and symbol systems. Astrologers will say, of course, it's metaphoric. Mars isn't physically doing anything to us in the ordinary sense. We use a metaphor of Mars to help us reveal, in a poetic way, the truth of human life. But we have to ask who is doing the seeing here; it is the psyche, but first and foremost, it is the psyche of the astrologer.

Of course, for many astrologers, their goal is to get the client to look into the metaphoric mirror. In the first picture below, there's Astro Annie, the astrologer with the beads, and she has succeeded in bringing the client to the mirror. But without Annie's mediumship, her creation of the space of astrology, there would be no mirror and no seeing. We have to say as a matter of principle that astrology, by definition, implies an observer, and further, the astrologer is fundamentally implicated in the act of seeing the symbol; seeing is totally distinct from the possibility and method of modern science, which must attempt to divorce observer from the material observed. And that's our dirty secret.

People like astrologers on YouTube; you have astrologers that you follow because their mediumship, their rendering, and their midwifing of your relationship with the symbols is appreciated. That subjective piece of what we're doing is what makes astrology divinatory, and that's the mercury Neptune aspect, and why I chose to do this under a Mercury-Neptune aspect.

The notion of the horoscope as a metaphoric mirror goes a long way to providing a working approach to astrology as divination, but it is not, in itself, quite enough to finally shake natal astrology away from its shadowy pseudo, causal, and deterministic foundations. This is because of the extraordinary power of the literal interpretation of the birth moment, the objective moment in clock time, is given an absolute status, not as a metaphor, but as a species of celestial causation, implanting the quote, metaphoric pattern at an actual clock time, a moment of birth.

Yet, if we stop to think about it, the significance of the birth moment has been assigned its significance by the various human actors and, of course, by the astrologers. In other words, the moment of birth is being treated by the astrologer as a biological event that is somehow seeing a metaphoric pattern, when instead, the moment of birth is a dramatic and emotional fact of human significance, and the planets are being referred to as a means of symbolizing that significance, but until there is someone to see that significance in the metaphoric mirror, there is no significance. We assign significance, not the stars. That is so perfectly said because if you look back at the history of astrology, we have birth charts being calculated from conception. We have birth charts calculated from birth. We have birth charts where there is a birth chart erected at the time that a person comes to see an astrologer because they don't have their birth data.

And none of that is problematic for astrologers because they understand the erecting moment of a chart to be of ritualistic significance given by human beings in their consciousness and that the gods somehow honor that assignment that we bring and then allow, through this beautiful language, the Conference of meaning upon that time. So, it's not an objective thing.

But what we don't understand is that just because something isn't purely objective doesn't mean that it is just patently false or irrelevant. You know, we have trouble with that. The view I have been enunciating here may seem highly mysterious, but it does begin to blossom in practice. Nobody has a problem if you just pick up an instrument and start playing, and it means something to you, and they have to locate the exact objective reason why it meant something to you. No one feels the urge to defend that. When it comes to the random way in which music might affect you, we have an agreed-upon, ritualized moment of significance that begins the song of a birth chart, right?

That allows us to use this chart as an Oracle throughout the whole course of our life. You know, the biggest way you can tell that someone hasn't understood this as oracular is they think that they are their chart. You are not your chart. The view I have been enunciating here may seem highly mysterious, but it does begin to blossom in practice. A perception I've had in teaching is that once students do much astrology other than natal, their attitude toward it begins to shift and break open when people get into horary, for instance, which is why I recommend all of my students take the one-year horary program that we offer at some point and see horary really working. They realize it does have an objectivity to it. However, all our existing rational categories are completely challenged by the practice of horary. That's because horary is not mediated by any causal or temporal origin. The birth moment. A genuine horary will show directly a description given by the heavens of a situation in human life there is here and now for you, for the person, and for whatever situation you are looking at as if the heaven suddenly mirrored in detail just this moment, this genuine moment, can also happen in an inceptional chart.

It's possible to explain by any rational means how there could be physically and objectively such a correspondence. But there is that is because the Oracle acknowledges and recognizes and is flexible enough to allow for divination to occur in any moment, as long as the moment has been charged with meaning through a conscious participant.

That's saying something about the nature of reality that is way more profound than the fear we have that what we're doing is objective classical astrology, on the whole, has a lot of trouble with horary and usually tries to repress it. You can see why it is clearly seen by any thoughtful astrologer and any philosopher who has looked at astrology over the centuries as directly suggesting divination.

But horary also poses the question to the astrologer: is the whole of astrology, even birth astrology, which appears to be working from influences at birth, actually of the same order? I suggest that it is another way to raise the question of astrology, as divination is the problem of wrong maps. Most astrologers who have practiced client work will have had the experience of producing a chart that works excellently, better even than the norm, but upon checking, it is found that Daylight Savings time is wrong by one hour you've done precise progressions, transits to angles, and they work, but you've got the wrong chart.

I don't think there are many astrologers with any degree of experience who have not had this happen, and it throws them. It's happened to me many times. I have cast horary charts for the wrong day or the wrong am or pm, gotten the exact right answer with a beautiful picture of the situation, and it was a completely wrong time. Happens a lot. A thoughtful astrologer, given our existing theory and model of astrology, is left with no position except that of a quasi-skeptic.

Oh, well, I suppose we can read anything into symbols. This is a poor position for us to take. Jeffrey Dean's book, Recent Advances in Natal Astrology, quotes with relish the case books of astrologers who have reported this phenomenon; obviously, to a scientific critic of astrology, this appears to push astrology out of the window entirely. There's no objectivity there at all.

It is true that if natal astrology depended on the physiologically objective time of birth, then wrong maps working would be almost impossible to rationalize and explain. But as I have already suggested, from the divinatory and metaphoric point of view, what counts is the horoscope that actually presents itself or comes up. This is why ancient astrologers didn't have a problem if someone didn't have the birth time to cast them a chart for the moment they met them; that's your birth chart where the psyche is concerned. Time is almost infinitely flexible.

This mysterious state of affairs cannot be justified by saying that maps work because the heavens are influencing things at a certain moment in real-time. That isn't how maps work. Horoscopes work because psyche and emotion are brought into a symbolic equation through some device. The normal and correct device for the astrologer, as a matter of ritual, not technique, is to absolutely strive to find the correct birth moment, which is a ritual procedure and not a technical procedure.

To state it again, the efficacy of astrology may not be dependent on the right or wrong map but on a process of the psyche by which an astrologer must steer. Basically, he brings himself or herself into line with the person and the material. See, we don't have any problem understanding that. That's how it works with Tarot.

For some reason, we think astrology is different, and it's certainly a mistake there. And you know how I can tell that there's a big problem with this because anytime you bring Tarot into astrology content, you will have a number of elitist people who don't understand how astrology works saying that astrology is of a higher level or order than Tarot bullshit. I'm just like, That pisses me off because that is so ignorant anyway. Certainly, there is enough evidence to at least make us question whether the basis of correct understanding in astrology is actually properly given by an objective moment of physical time. It is one of the roads to folly, for example, to study patterns of airline accidents. Most horoscopes of catastrophic events are actually meaningless charts. Any search for midpoints, harmonics, or other subtleties in the chart in order to try to scrape a meaning out of it is simply not fruitful. Why expect a particular moment in clock time to yield a particular pattern? A moment does not have significance until there is somebody there for whom it is significant. From the perspective of astrology as divination, psychic engagement is the key to a meaningful symbol. See, we don't have a problem with that.

Again, when it comes to Tarot, you know that it is the ritual act of seeking out significance and then using the cards in a spread that allows you to make a correlation. Or you're just walking around the world, and something happens, and you think of a card; it's because you are, you are ritualistically engaging with the event in a reflective manner that conjures up a divinatory symbol. But that conjuring is crucial Mercury-Neptune. We're advocating for a Mercury-Neptune understanding of things. It's not entirely logical. It's not entirely intuitive. It is a combination of both.

I do not underestimate the fact that these are difficult arguments for some of my fellow astrologers to accept. I'd like to refocus on the main theme of this discussion and draw it to a conclusion by putting the main question again with the help of a diagram. I've suggested that some part of the phenomenon of astrology belongs to the natural world and is, in principle, amenable to scientific investigation. Nevertheless, the main part of what we do is the interpretation of symbols to arrive at a particular inference and judgment, whether about character or events in life, and this practice is divination, not science.

If we believe that astrology is about science, either in the modern, materialist sense or in the more subtle spiritual, scientific sense of the medieval model given by Aristotle, then we will either find our terminology and discussion below the dividing line on the diagram, either type of science, medieval or modern, will actually take us to an energy model of astrology, perhaps involving planetary rays or some type of causation, however spiritual or pseudo cosmic causation, disguised and misunderstood as synchronicity.

This diagram, which we don't have, illustrates the divide between a sign or symbol and a cause. It is my belief that from the time of Greek astrology, our classical tradition has never successfully distinguished these two possibilities and has perpetually confused them. St Augustine, perhaps the most formidable and perceptive of all our opponents, saw our dilemma clearly. He knew pagan practices and studied astrology in his youth; in his great attack on our art, he observed that astrologers, when it suits them, will say Mars caused the action of violence in that man. And if then pressed on that point, we'll say Mars was a symbol.

But catch them another moment, and they're back to talking as if Mars caused the thing. Augustine said that astrologers' language always slipped and was never clear between causation versus symbolizing processes. Yes, we actually do rely on a causal model, especially with our classic medieval model, and because it depends on objective time, clock time, it depends on this illusion of objectivity to secure it. I can't tell you enough how liberating it has been for me to no longer try to insist to myself or anyone else in my life that astrology represents something objective or that I try to push or prove that astrology should be considered as something as objective as anything scientifically respectable.

No one fights on behalf of music that way, or poetry or art, or the experiences of, you know, an altered state. Astrology doesn't need that. In my humble opinion, astrology of this kind is a form of empirical observation, and the significance derived appears to be of theoretical significance with the astrologer as an observer. This is science, the correct procedure for reading this type of logical inference from symbols. This is the model of Greek, Roman, and Arabic astrology until, ultimately, it cannot disengage astrology from fatalism. Humanistic astrology.

In the 20th century, a noble project has attempted to disengage the classical model from fatalism by saying that the birth chart shows potential rather than actuality. It makes that distinction in order to escape the old problem. If. You're born, says this school of thought, with a very powerful Saturn you have the potential for certain experiences of a saturnine nature. Remember, however, that this is a velvet glove fatalism because you're still fated to have been born with a Saturn potential. It hasn't actually escaped the problem. A much more radical move is needed to recognize that the very structure of what we do in interpreting horoscopes depends not upon the influence of the heavens, upon the seed, nor upon some objective time quality stamped out by the heavens, not even by synchronistic co-occurrence and objective time.

It depends on the significant presentation of the symbol to consciousness, and the moment doesn't determine its significance for us. We assign significance to the moment, and anytime we are engaging in an astrological mode of reflection or prediction or description, it is because in consciousness, we are ritualizing our experience in this way, and then the heavens are completely open and available and make itself available to speak with us because we want to speak with it. It's like, hey, knocking the doors open anytime you want to talk. I'm here.

But what we have to recognize is that that's what always is happening when you're reflecting or contemplating or talking about astrology or thinking about astrology, and you start thinking about and seeing and engaging with the symbols you're talking to something. It's a it's a relational dialog. It's an i thou situation, remembering that you're doing that and that you're speaking with something takes you out of an astrological paradigm of fatalism and pseudo objectivism, the moment doesn't determine significance for us. We assign significance to the moment; then, we see that astrology is about chaotic and irrational signs and omens of things that are unplanned and can't be predicted. If and when a sign occurs, we read it, so many of us like to read it, and many of us like to see and notice signs every day, and that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. We're chatty people who like to chat with the Oracle, but let's not mistake what's happening for something pseudo-scientific. There's no technique to make signs and omens occur, but there is a ritual we make to invite the gods and spirits and create the space wherein the sign may occur, the sacred space of the horoscope; then we just see what comes up the time of astrology is no longer Aristotelian objective time. It is the time assigned given by the intentionality of consciousness, and that which shows in response comes by grace or Providence or chance. Looking at astrology this way raises more questions than it answers; what I have touched on here just skims the surface, but divination is at the heart of the issue, and how each of us answers that question matters very much.

So, I know that was a long essay. I wanted to do something to celebrate and honor and acknowledge Jeffrey Cornelius and the role that he's played in my own development as an astrologer, the way I do astrology, and a lot of probably what you like about my channels and informed by this approach that constitutes my own, uh, relationship with astrology. A lot of this comes from his book, which is called the moment of astrology, origins, and divination. If you haven't read that book, I think it is easily the most impactful book that I've ever read in terms of something that's impacted the way I do astrology. And if you found some of this provocative, or you find yourself disagreeing, that's totally fine. What I also like about Jeffrey, and he said this all the time when he taught, was, look, this is my view, and if it does nothing other than get us thinking about what astrology is and why we're doing it, that can't be anything but good, right? Even if we don't agree with each other, we can agree that we're brothers and sisters who all love the same, the same craft, the same language.

So I hope you'll take some good things away from this and not find that any disagreements you're having are too inflammatory, especially because I get real passionate about the subject, you know. But anyway, I hope you're having a good day and that you enjoyed this. This gave you room to think about that interesting contrast between Mercury and Neptune in the sky. Let this essay be the way in which the symbol speaks. Stick around after I sign off for a little bit more about the upcoming year one program. Bye.