Why/How Astrology?
This page is to help people who are struggling with how astrology could be useful or real.
If your only exposure to astrology is newspaper horoscopes and popular memes, you may have no idea how rich its history is.
Modern horoscopic astrology arose over 2000 years ago in ancient Greece, incorporating earlier divination techniques and traditions from Babylonia and Egypt. It has had remarkable longevity despite being actively suppressed by the Christian church and later trivialized and dismissed by the post-Enlightenment materialist-rationalist consensus about the nature of reality.
But what you may not know is that the roots of “Western civilization” and the roots of astrology are one and the same. From Pythagoras to Plato, the people we were taught to see as foundational to modern rational thought were actually mystics who saw the cosmos as a living system. Astrology is the study of that cosmos and the Divine purpose behind it.
What I got from astrology that I never got from psychology
I love psychology, and I’ve studied many aspects of it including clinical training. But something about it never really worked for me.
I’m ADHD, autistic, queer, non-binary, and kinky—all things that modern psychology has in various ways pathologized. For my own sanity and self-love, I needed an alternative way to see myself than as a broken weirdo.
Astrology is decentralized, meaning it contains no authority or hierarchy to tell you what to believe or the right way to be a human. This makes it categorically affirming in a way modern psychology isn’t.
Astrology also covers territory that psychology doesn’t—it directly speaks to the development of the soul, the nature of incarnation, the purpose of each person’s life, and the way transpersonal energy effects the human experience.
I first started looking at astrology to try to understand my relationships, which were gripping, painful, transcendent, and confusing. All psychology could offer was attachment theory. That did help me figure out and heal certain parts of my childhood trauma—but it didn’t explain why this was happening to me. But my brutally exact 0° 0’ square between Pluto in Libra and Venus in Cancer in my 8th? With Neptune in Sag conjunct my AC and Venus ruling my 6th? Yeah, that explains everything.
My chart also showed the way out—what I needed to own and develop in myself to transmute this karmic signature.
My Venus-Pluto lessons included self-love, self-valuing, self-validation, and self-protection. Pluto taught me to own my own power, to stop outsourcing my value to others, and to stop trying to heal other people’s wounds and heal my own instead.
Neptune teaches that fantasy is not fulfillment by hooking your deepest attachments and appearing to give you everything you want—but requiring you to endlessly sacrifice yourself to maintain the illusion. After decades of dancing with my Neptunian projections, I eventually got sick of them.
The outer planets are not easy teachers. But understanding that there is a lesson here makes all the difference. And psychology just does not have that framework, because it’s a spiritual framework.
How to reconcile science and astrology
Planetary configurations are not causal. But astrology never said they were.
The relationship between the planets and events is the same as between a clock and time itself. Clocks show the time, they don’t make time happen.
Theories that there is some causal mechanism where the planets affect the human when it is born make no sense as soon as you scratch the surface and realize how the whole system is symbolic.
There are half a dozen popular house systems, and dozens of different schools of astrology that have wildly different ways of interpreting the same symbols.
And they all work—how can that be? Because you can say “the sky is blue” in 100 different languages, and you’re always describing the same quality of the same sky—just with different words. Astrology is a language, or a family of languages, to describe reality and how it unfolds through time.
But still—how could the positions of the planets symbolically have any bearing on a human’s personality, let alone world events?
The answer requires a different model of reality, where subjective and objective are two sides of the same experience.
You have probably heard the phrase, As above, so below. As within, so without.
Astrology works because everything in reality is a symbolic fractal of everything else. The fundamental strata of reality is not quantum—it’s symbolic.
Science is never going to “find” that strata, because understanding it requires a different way of engaging with reality—the way that mystics and shamans have engaged throughout human history.
Astrology is not pseudoscience—it’s divination
The ability to dialogue with the Universe as an oracle is what we call divination—and that is what astrology is, and always was. It only became a pseudoscience when science gained a monopoly on legitimacy and everything else was measured in comparison to it.
But if you let yourself forget about proof and measurement, causality and replicability—you can enter a rich world of magic and meaning that has no equal. There is no other system of psycho-spiritual knowledge and philosophy that is so sprawling and yet so elegant at its core.
It is also decentralized, democratic, open to all, and free to practice.
I grew up as an atheist, and I know it’s a mindfuck to give up materialism as the only “real” way to see reality. But there is so much available on the other side of that mountain.
