Just before the recent Solar Eclipse, I started a program on the Astrology of Healing with Will Morris and Lee Lehman. As part of the program, I’ll be writing regular reflections on the course material, and I thought I'd share many of them with you. Today, I wanted to reflect on the overall notion of the Astrology of Healing, or how Astrology can help in healing.
To begin with, there are all of the techniques of medical astrology, which were part of doctor’s training in the West until the 1700s or so and still exist as a part of Ayurveda. Through the horoscope, we can assess one’s constitution and temperament, analyzing what one would need in terms of lifestyle in order to feel healthy and where potential health problems lay. When illness comes, we can assess through the chart of the moment of onset (the decumbiture) to understand the energies at play, predict the severity or length of the illness, and what might be used to assist in healing. Astrology can help us understand the good and bad days, hours, or even minutes to undertake treatment, whether that be a homeopathic dosing, regular herbal routine, or surgical intervention.
Astrology, in this regard, is sort of an add-on to any other medical practice, although it intersects most easily with those forms of traditional, complementary, or alternative healthcare that have a spiritual and elemental understanding of health and illness. But there’s another level of healing that has to do more with the soul, which is so intertwined with our physical, somatic experience. There are the physical processes of illness, but there’s also the suffering and mental and emotional battles that we experience on top of that—the pain of figuring out the why, as well as the what. I think this sort of suffering is a lot of the reason that people seek out astrology and astrologers to begin with—and it was the context in which I was cracked open to deeper parts of myself and the notion that there might be a larger, more-than-human coherent order in the cosmos.
Here, astrology becomes a form of biography work, helping us understand ourselves and the patterns of our lives. It helps us make sense of chaos, revealing archetypal structures in our psychology, our behavior, and our relationships. In the context of a healing crisis of some sort, it can help us articulate the patterns that gave rise to imbalances and, eventually, hardship and help us discern places where we might have room to participate in improvement.
This is also where the tricky realm of fate and free will comes into play, a mystery that I feel needs to be approached with grave sincerity. Astrology developed out of a practice of reading omens in Babylon, where, until looking to the weather, meteors, and stars, looking at the livers of sacrificed animals was the preferred way of divining the will of the gods. We have tablets containing extensive lists of omens and their interpretations, which reveal an intense concern, above all, with the collective well-being. These texts didn’t necessarily attribute causal fate to these omens, though—more often, they were correlations—not if x, then y, but rather, x and y appear at the same time. Usually, there was a prescription for a specific type of ritual to be undertaken and a specific god or goddess that needed to be appealed to.
Thus, from the beginning, the cosmology that gave rise to astrology was participatory and not strictly deterministic, although that may have changed somewhat when astrology integrated with the Greek and Indian cosmologies, both of which had deep concerns with fate/karma and destiny/duty. Adding to the complexity is my resonance with the notion that as humanity has evolved over the centuries, our relationship with freedom has shifted—this is the central thrust of Rudolf Steiner’s concept of the era of the Consciousness Soul. Essentially, since the Renaissance or so, humanity has entered its teenage phase, and the angels have stepped back a bit, given us the wheel, and said, “Now you drive.”
I still honestly don't understand the fullness of the intricate workings and requirements of karma/fate in an astrology chart, but I’m mostly okay with that—although astrology definitely seems to point the way to an understanding of these mysteries, I’m not sure it’s entirely appropriate for one soul to tell another about the rigid contours of their fate, especially in a way that could trespass on their freedom. When asked to make predictions, I find it usually suffices to speak in terms of working with different qualities of energies and their probable expression. And importantly, to a certain degree, I think it’s healing just to witness the wonder of astrology, recognizing that there is an order to the cosmos, a correspondence between the macrocosm and microcosm. Although I’m striving to understand them in my own life and how they can be assessed astrologically, I’m mostly okay with not knowing the specific limits of fate or the exact stipulations of karma—astrology is certainly very instructive in making use of whatever freedom we have.
And now, the play-by-play on the astrology of the next couple of weeks for my paid subscribers. It will be an eventful couple of weeks, with Venus and Mars changing signs and Pluto going retrograde. Of course, I’m always available for readings if you’re interested!
Warmth,
Charlie