STARFIRE

February 2009

February 2009- Astrology and Life Mastery
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Astrology and Life Mastery

“Is my birth chart still relevant?”

The first client who asked whether he’d outgrown his birth chart had spent years in serious meditation and spiritual training. He hoped, devoutly, that he’d moved beyond what he saw as the limitations of his natal or original chart and that he now lived exclusively by his progressed chart.

The progressed chart, unfortunately for him, is personal and relevant only because it is based on the natal chart.

Over the years, I’ve heard the same question in many forms. Some clients want to work exclusively with relocation charts, others with charts from the time and place they received a new name or started a new life.

What we outgrow isn’t the natal chart. We outgrow the perceived limitations based on interpretations of the natal chart.

Astrological interpretations are simply human reasoning about correspondences between astrological cycles and events and human events and feelings. They describe both events we understand and those that are beyond our present comprehension in symbolic terms our minds can study and play with.

As our human experience changes, the correspondences change. Every shift of Pluto from one sign to another seems to bring new paradigms and we find correspondences to planets and signs to give them a place in the filing systems of our minds.

Sometimes the correspondences change in the public realm and we all see the shifts. AIDS came with Pluto’s arrival in Scorpio and was almost as unmentionable as other sexual diseases and disorders. Eventually, it came to be seen more like a plague and took on the correspondence to Pluto’s massive impact more than to Scorpio’s sexual secrets.

In our personal lives, other events mark changes in our understanding and affect the way we need to interpret transits and correspondences. Uranus, ruler of electrifying creative insights, is now also recognized as the ruler of computers and stereos–but you couldn’t have sold that correspondence to the first interpreters. They say Uranus only as the harbinger of human freedom and scientific reason.

Thomas Troward, a British judge and metaphysical scholar, said “Principle [God] is not limited by precedence.” Troward’s point was that our lives aren’t limited to what happened yesterday; we live in a constantly growing and changing universe. Our human experience isn’t limited to the experiences we had yesterday.

And in our own lives, new understandings and new experiences give rise to new responses to astrological events.

Saturn, for example, always represents constriction and contraction. Saturn is seen in the density of building foundations and the structure of dams. Saturn is also creative focus. John Updike once said he liked the middle of things, where the extremes, meet; his focus on the middle gave continuity to the wide range of stories and articles he wrote. Shakespeare’s poetic lines shaped the expression of his thoughts and feelings. Saturn is the bones of our body and the structure of our sentences.

In January, Jupiter moved into Aquarius. Jupiter’s expansive nature meeting the curiosity and independence of Aquarius offers each of us the change to expand our horizons.

Saturn continues to oppose Uranus, the ancient ruler opposing the modern ruler of Aquarius. It’s an old dance–and Jupiter brings a new vibration to the party. It’s like taking the same old pitchfork to dig a hole in a new field. Jupiter in Aquarius fertilizes and expands the mind and makes new combinations possible.

There are innumerable ways to apply the idea that interpretations change. We can study economic cycles and predict them from past transits–but we need to take new combinations into account to study present and future cycles.

Pluto in Capricorn has moved the current recession around the world more rapidly than economic changes ever moved before. And yet people are still predicting the same slow recovery.

Last week someone said it took a war to end the Great Depression. And a war did end it–but another interpretation might be that the war triggered a rush of human invention and that the human invention ended the depression. Perhaps leadership and inspiration will trigger enough invention to end the depression now. Or perhaps it will be some other event that teaches us a new correspondence for the old cycles.

One thing has always been true about astrology: Some people accept its interpretations as limitations and others see it as opportunities to master new circumstances. Those who see astrological events as stimulants to growth and development are the ones who outgrow the old interpretations.

Mary O’Gara, Ph.D.