Weather Vanes

The idea of the planets predicting the weather has been in general speculation since people notice both planets and weather, together. For a good history, see Kim Farnell’s excellent astrological weather article. But really, how does the above really influence the below here? According to the chaos theory butterfly concept, you shouldn’t be able to predict it, as there are too many variables. A breath of air here magnifies to a hurricane there – or more problematically, yet someplace, almost anyplace else.

But maybe scaling, as we’ve been discussing here and here, calls the shots. Perhaps it’s “invariable scaling”, as they put it in the latest lead article of New Scientist. It would appear that the larger global patterns of weather, at varying altitudes, may be totally in sync with the smaller ones, perhaps “down to scales smaller than a millimetre.”  Now that’s locked-in scaling, backed up by adaptations of  exponential “power laws” that are at least, well, mathematical. The implication that scaling from large to small, and from slow to fast, in whatever spatial or temporal dimension your are considering, is the same and very closely reflective should be good news to astrologers. Well, at least to astrologers who are willing to look at their art as a part of a universal principle, in which they are ad hoc experts at one particular part of multiple sets of scaling, specifically the frequency range of the planets’ orbits.

Other news that makes one take another look at how different sets of scaling are viewed from different perspectives of time and lifespan comes from robins. Like other animals that can see things we don’t (or have forgotten how to), it would appear they don’t just feel (or smell), but actually see magnetic lines to guide them. What we experience, at the scale of our lifetimes, is critical to the very structure of astrology, as astrology may be just a part of that higher structure principle. It would explain a lot, from mathematics, to music, to art, not to mention the weather…what we don’t fully see, yet, are the missed connections, the scales we experience but don’t connect, or the ones we don’t see at all…

Drum Notes

Drum notes? Indeed.

It turns out, on reflection, that if your drummer winds up and plays fast enough he might be playing your alto line. For those into the music in astrology (or the other way round) as covered in my recent article Windowpanes, here’s a couple of more discoveries about the wonders of scaling. There I noted that the periods of the planets doubled (like octaves) until you reached the audio scale turned into recognizable notes and harmonies, with a list of notes for the planets.  That article was written before I noticed that, on a much closer level, if you take a 3 over 4 beat (like 60 beats per minute together with 80) and double them until you get up to the tonal range, you get a natural fifth, and so on with other syncopations, which actually produce melody and chords when speeded up. In other words, when you raise the rhythm track to the next recognizable higher scale, you get melody and harmony, and the reverse as well. So, the principle of proportionate scaling even applies within segments of the audio range itself.

Now, in a recent article in New Scientist magazine called Winners Wear Red, science has done another set of experiments to prove the obvious: that lower-spectrum colors (like red) are more noticeable, have more impact, and seem more threatening than higher-spectrum colors (like blue) which are associated with more delicate and intellectual feelings. The lower sets the pace and forces the demands, the higher shapes and filigrees the details of where it’s proceeding. That’s a principle that applies in music as well (bass track drives and structures the mid and treble melody and harmonies, and the rhythm track many octaves below (as we have noticed) drives the entirety of the melody sections both bass and treble. So, too, the lower-frequency outer planets are the traditional drivers of social change, while the middle and inner planets paint what’s happening in the shorter-range details, particularly among individuals, who are in turn caught up and driven by the larger, lower-frequency picture.

It’s the same the whole world (or universe) over. One wonders what tunes the microbes are humming, and what relatively (to us) mini-beats are setting their tiny toes to tapping…

Woodstock Solar Return

Now that everybody’s reminiscing about Woodstock, whether they were there or not, why not another? I could have been – and probably should have been – at Woodstock. After all, I was running one of the hippest multitrack studios in New York, where Frank Zappa did all his East Coast recording, and my new record company had just scored a top ten single and was riding high. Hey, my girlfriend went to Woodstock, as did the rest of my band…but I?

I was in Veracruz, Mexico – a place I’d never even heard of – to get my solar return right, according to the advice of my astrologer, Al. H. Morrison. It really was a big improvement over anywhere near New York, taking Pluto off the 7^th cusp and changing a weak Pisces Ascendant to Aquarius with its ruler conjunct Jupiter and Moon in the 8^th and Mars right on the MC. The following year worked out just so, accordingly, and changed my life…

Veracruz, where I got stuck for a week thanks to bad plane connections, was an endless series of Cuba Libres, watching “Viejo Fantastico” on the bar TV, and either taking in the local mariachis or playing my mandolin sitting on the edge of the town square fountain, which always attracted adventures and even got me taken home to dinner by some young admirers. Then there were the taxidermed bullfrogs sold for pocketbooks and the total blackening of the sky by cave swallows every sunset. Spanish was the only challenge, from toilet paper the day I arrived (not in the dictionary, had to mime it) to mandolin strings (cuerdas) when I broke one. A little pointing and gesticulation will get you a long way…and I left having written a new song in 7/4, in Spanish, penned for the occasion:

Yo no tengo toallas, yo no tengo jabon,

Yo no tengo papel sanitario, en mi habatacion…

Cho:

La Ley de Dios no tiene trampas,

Saben ustedes in sus corazones!

…and so on…

That was the first time, but not the last, I traveled to sometimes unknown places seeking a better solar return – first on Al’s advice, later on my own. Does it work? Hard to say, since you never know what would have happened otherwise. Does it change your life? Absolutely. A trek to St. John’s, Newfoundland two years later didn’t pay off for twenty-one years, until I found myself guiding a tall ship there (I sold the captain on it, he’d never been) for a triumphal, media-soaked visit as the crew of young Poles met a town of partying Newfies, two cultures who most eloquently share the language of the bottle…many were Screeched on that visit, you may be sure…then the year following I chose to take a reluctant trip to the AFA convention (never my fave) in Dallas for a better return, which was where I first met the long-time friend who convinced me to write my first book, on composite charts…

Of course, you can’t always get what you want. 2008 saw a dreadful New York return – afflicted full Moon, Sun in the 12^th, Moon in 6^th, the prescription for everything from ill health to personal disaster. How to escape it? New Orleans was perfect. Had the flight and the hotel all lined up and a sudden tropical storm shut down all flights anywhere near there for the period, so I was stuck. The result? Lost two jobs, suffered months of excruciating kidney stone complications out of the blue…glad that year is past, but then so are a lot of other people…this one looks a lot better, just staying put, so we’ll see…

If the butterfly effect means anything, then just crossing the street at the right moment can change your destiny, but the pure adventure of flying to meet it on your birthday certainly has a lot to recommend it…

 [credit: painting above “Mariachi 2” is by Veracruz artist Manuel Zardain]

Comes To Mind…

Language is critical to observation and vice versa, in so many ways. Most particularly, we tend to notice only those things we have words or phrases for, and those we don’t often escape us, despite being right in front of our eyes, even an important part of the picture. It’s a daily, forward-moving occurrence – someone coins a phrase for some phenomenon, and suddenly a door opens and you notice it all over the place and wonder where it was hiding all these years. A missing piece you didn’t know was missing.

 

A good example is Saturn chasing Moon chasing Saturn, subject of this blog on 3/30/09. As soon as I re-noticed that old chestnut, it started turning up as currently important in all kinds of charts of friends, family, and clients alike. I’m sure you’ve had the same experience, part of the general principle that things come in clusters, not in equal random distribution. That may itself be an actual attraction principle in the world of information as Paul Kammerer suggested, not just synchronicity, or it could be a passing planetary transit herding like things together. After all, most of the people you’ve known share degree areas with you, don’t they? And, there are some degrees you rarely see, and not accidently they are the ones not prominent in your own chart. If you haven’t noticed that, look back over the charts you’ve collected. They often look like they condensed around you, which is why I have suggested you can rectify your chart not just by events but by the degree areas of the people you associate with.

 

Sometimes those “Aha!” moments happen just looking at your own chart and finding an obvious explanation staring you in the face that you never noticed (or properly understood) for years. One of them is the dreaded “mysterious degree,” one particular degree that just keeps popping up in important event charts or relationships that effect you or people you deal with but don’t seem to be explained by any of your own planets, midpoints, Arabic parts, even hypothetical planets. Do you have one (or more)? Odds on, if you’ve had your eyes open, you do.

 

For years, I was chasing down 7 and 23 of Libra (and slightly less so their Aries opposites), which were always turning up, like there were some critical bodies hanging in there, but there just weren’t. Then it finally dawned on me, when I made the larger connection with Lagrange points and how important they must be to astrology in general, since they are perhaps the most critical resonance points in every orbit in the solar system. Points L4 and L5 are the only absolutely stable points happening around any planet, so they should be important indeed. In astrological terms, they are the lowly sextile, not much heralded in most texts you read. Yet there they were, the sextiles to both my Moon and Sun, right at those degrees. Better go check them out yourself, you might be surprised how foundational they are to your chart without your having noticed it, simply because you really weren’t looking in the most obvious place.

 

What else are we missing, that’s staring us in the face? You never know – particularly if there isn’t a proper word or phrase for it yet, or it’s simply been misplaced – until it comes to mind…

Incendiary Prospects

Nighttime IED explosion

It’s that time again, when combined hothead planets Mars and Uranus get together in the sky for a pulse that often lays out the future geography of the next two years’ troubles, at least those that the two jointly cover, of sudden and tumultuous kinds: eruptions, explosions, wars, earthquakes, firestorms, tidal waves, and other scary events often a favorite subject for our art. To reduce the story to blog-entry size:

 

The longitude where the exact conjunction is overhead, at the Midheaven, is said to be the most prone to such awesome effects, with a track record of Hiroshima, the Indonesian tsunami, and hurricane Katrina falling right in to the pattern, along with a host of wars and rumors of war over recent decades. The last one was over the Middle East, which was a foregone conclusion, anyway. The next one is over Western Europe, however, which could be troublesome, indeed. For the full-length skinny on that subject and its history, complete with maps, see http://www.astrococktail.com/MarsUranus.html

 

It’s not just about mundane astrology, affecting nations and continents, it’s also personal. If you’ve got anything in your chart around 24 Pisces (it happens April 15, 6 PM EDT), it’s a good idea to stay out of the way of potential accidents on the several days around it. The Mars transit is bad enough itself (managed to fall off a ladder this last time to the Ascendant, despite giving it fairly wide berth), but add Uranus, and it can be high-impact, indeed. Some years ago I had a client who was a reformed hit man. I told him to lay low that week, but he didn’t, and I got a call from the New Jersey homicide division only a few days later, who had found my card on his executed body. You can read his grim tale at  http://www.llewellynjournal.com/article/476

 

So, times are chaotic enough right now without inadvertently stepping on any mines that might be avoided. Tell your friends, family, and clients to walk with care – and your foes, well, double-dare them to take a risk!…na zdrowie, and we really mean it…there are three solid months of very sexciting Venus-Mars conjunctions you’ll want to stick around for, right afterwards…

Shooting The Sun

  

Eight Bells, by Winslow Homer

I’ve lately been moderator for the “Science and Astrology” discussion groups in Matrix’s ACT forum, and in the “physical basis” thread arose the problem of whether what we believe to be “facts” in astrology and use daily, including signs, aspects, houses, etc., though not accepted by most in scientific circles, are ahead of what’s accepted or simply occasionally successful conjurings of our own. That debate is still ongoing there, but here is a literally star-studded example from the historically real world which may support both sides of this very relative issue.

[condensed from the log of the supercargo on board the Dolphin, 1815, in the collection of The Mariners' Museum, Newport News, Virginia] For those who have actually had a sextant in hand or are old enough astrologers to have worked from tables, this is even more specifically amusing…

 

On March 20, 1815, the brig Dolphin sailed out of Beaufort, North Carolina, with a cargo of tobacco bound for Gibraltar (these events were recorded by her supercargo, the man in charge of selling the goods on arrival).  They almost immediately sailed into stormy weather, which continued for a week, although neither captain nor supercargo cared much, because the captain was a very good cook, and there were plenty odrinkables on board for the officers, a rare situation in those days…

 

When the skies briefly cleared, the three ranking lieutenants got out their sextants and “shot the sun” (reading its altitude to determine the ship’s latitude).  And, the ship adjusted its course accordingly, to accurately reach Gibraltar.  This was repeated each rare time the weather cleared.

 

Strange, though, the weather got colder and worse, and by April it began to snow.  Unheard-of in those climes.  Finally, they sighted a few rocky islands in the mist and snow and took them to be the islands off North Africa you sight before reaching Gibraltar.  So they sailed between them and went on.  Finally, they sighted a coastline with massive mountains split by waterways surrounded by towering cliffs.  This was not Gibraltar…

 

Shortly, they sighted a small fishing boat, which they hailed first in English, then Spanish, then Portuguese, Dutch, French, German, all to no avail.  So they pulled up aside it and demanded the frightened fisherman to come on board, at the point of a musket.  They took him below and pulled out a chart of the world and made motions for him to show them where they were.  Putting his finger on the chart, “Christiansound, Christiansound!” the fisherman cried, speaking Norwegian.  Suddenly they realized, in stark disbelief, that they were not near Gibraltar, but off he coast of Norway!

 

Reeling with the news, the officers asked the fisherman to guide them to Christiansound harbor, apologized, and thanked him profusely.  And, their luck held out and they found that there was a great shortage of tobacco in Christiansound and sold their cargo at great profit…all’s well that end’s well…

 

But how had it happened?  The most careful attempts of three officers at navigation and location of the ship had failed utterly.  The “islands off Gibraltar” had been, in fact, the Faeroe Islands, north of Scotland, in some of the most treacherous waters in the world.  Steering by their own stars, they were lucky to be alive…

 

Finally, sitting in port, they figured it out.  When they left North Carolina, it was right at the spring equinox.  In navigation, as the Sun moves higher above the equator, you must subtract this motion in order to properly get your position.  The officers, to a man, probably following one another, had added it instead, and then adjusted the ship’s course continually northward as a result.  A combination of good food, good drink, bad weather, and a fatal flaw, landed them in Christiansound.  They came out of it with a profit, but who knows how many other sailors have perished of the same kind of conditions?…

Moon Chasing Saturn, Chasing Moon

For those looking for previously-noticed but rarely-mentioned astro-phenomena (older terms like “besieged” and “Cazimi” come to mind), here’s one. Alternately called Moon chasing Saturn or Saturn chasing Moon (properly the former, as the faster applies to the slower), it happens when the progressed Moon (with a 27 ½ year cycle) locks into aspect with transiting Saturn (with 29 ½ year cycle). It’s most noticeable in nativities with Moon conjunct Saturn, as the poor child has transiting Saturn right on top of its progressed Moon for its formative years. Depending upon the speed of the Moon and the closeness of the original aspect, it can be as brief as three or four years or last into the teens, as the Moon plods along and Saturn backs and fills around it in alternating direct and retrograde motion.

The same relentlessly-long effect occurs with nativities with Moon square or opposite Saturn, emphasizing and prolonging the Saturn effect well after birth and into childhood. You’ll usually find it referenced in relation to the natal chart, but it happens to everybody as a progression-transit tangle, at least twice in an average lifespan, with two succeeding Moon-Saturn involvements, though not always hard aspects. That’s because the synodic period of the two is about 420 years, and so roughly every 35 years they engage one aspect further along (if you’re only using Ptolemaic aspects plus semisextile and quincunx, more if you use others). If you’re born with Moon near the waxing trine (120 degrees) with Saturn, come age 35, they will have worked themselves into a quincunx, and by your late 60s they’ll be in opposition. Or, if they were near a waning square (270 degrees) at birth, around 35 you’ll be experiencing a supportive waning sextile (300 degrees) and finish off with a waning semisextile (330 degrees). And if you live to 105, you get three versions.

 

Of course, if your natal Moon and Saturn aren’t in aspect to begin with, you’ll get your first lock-in at a different age, but they’ll usually be about 35 years apart. As a rule of thumb, if your natal Moon is, say, 20 degrees from its next aspect to Saturn, then your first Moon-chasing-Saturn aspect will be that aspect and start around age 23 or so, the next one at the following aspect 35 years later at around 58. But, because the speed of the Moon varies so much, it’s best to do it on a computer, as that general rule can be as much as a decade off for periods when the progressed Moon is very slow or very fast.

 

Some sources, notably Celeste Teal, have rather dire things to say about the hard aspects, and others paint it as a rarity, which it’s not. Here are some opinions on the subject ranging from Devore, Teal, and others, which themselves have further references:

 

* From Kingsley’s blog about Ben Cousin’s chart

* From Café Astrology, comparing it to Lemony Snicket

* From Celeste Teal’s site

* From Devore’s Encyclopedia of Astrology

* From Identifying Planetary Triggers (Teal)

 

Although you usually see it brought up in reference to individuals, you can also see a mention of it in America’s national chart in our own Dark Days piece a while back. For the Sibly chart, anyway, the Moon will be chasing Saturn by conjunction right around the period of America’s first Pluto return. The opposition happened in the early 1800s, starting some time after the War of 1812.

 

It’s a little piece of astrological cycle arcana unto itself, but in the end, it is just another example demonstrating what most astrologers already know as a general rule: easy aspects at birth mean good fortune early in life but often progress into a more difficult older age, especially if native talents are taken for granted. Conversely, hard aspects at birth mean you make all your mistakes early and have to work it out, with progressions bringing you a flowering maturity born of experience. These kind of alternating experiences are part of the whole picture, the rolling overlaps of natal, progressions, and transits that are fundamentally integrated because most of the planetary periods are all simple mathematical functions of each other. Another even tighter one is transiting Saturn and progressed lunations, both with almost precisely the same period of 29 ½ years, locked into the same relationship in succeeding signs for life. So, by comparison,  when you find that Saturn and progressed Moon are chasing each other’s tails for a few years, remember that this too will pass, with another interesting variation lined up for the next chapter in your life.  

Manhattanhenge

I was recently back in contact with Dennis Price, a marvelous combination of archaeologist, writer, investigator, storyteller, and scientific and spiritual explorer, whose forthcoming book next month is all about where Jesus likely spent those missing 18 years before coming back to the Middle East. Where? Clue: his cousin Joseph – you know, the one from Arimathea. Go find out the rest at Dennis’s site Eternal Idol along with lots more about all kinds of research and extrapolation of classical and archaeological sources that are mind-openers. The specific article that specifically set my wheels to turning was about Stonehenge and its “astrological” or in general skyward implication . Definitely worth a read, especially because he recognizes the multiplicity of sky-pointing artifacts, stone and wood circles, sky temples, stellar rock inscriptions, you name it, from earliest times and the many different (and often totally misplaced) explanations that have been and still are being given for them. What were they actually made for, as opposed to what we surmise looking back in time with too little evidence? Astrologers claim it at least in part for our own, but we aren’t the only ones who seem too sure of just what these mysterious monuments of ancient times were all about. Explanations vary from calendars for crop planting, sky worship temples, ritual healing centers, earth power shrines, even space alien ports. You can see lots more (too much for a blog entry) here – but you don’t have to go seek out Neolithic monuments to see spectacular solar alignments which involve and thrill millions of spectators every year.

 

Take Manhattan (the Bronx, and Staten Island, too – but mostly Manhattan). Stonehenge, Aztec and Mayan Temples, and maybe the Great Pyramid of Giza are all precisely aligned with the position of the Midsummer sun, so that a long, dramatic ray of light will pierce a long avenue or sacred chamber only on Midsummer day (June 21). From that, some conclude that ancient astrologers guided the destiny of these civilizations and that they held great festivals to honor the yearly event.

 

So how about New York City? Walking to work one spring a number of decades ago, I discovered that our own humble Big Apple Druids (an 1807 three-member commission made up of New York Governeur Morris, lawyer John Rutherfurd and surveyor Simeon De Witt) had set up the streets in similar fashion to dazzle and decorate future festivals and perhaps befuddle archaeologists to come looking for deeper meaning.

 

If the sky is not cloudy on May 28 or July 11, you’ll be treated to that magical shaft of light streaking down the east-west streets of Manhattan. It’s really a sight to behold, and blinding if you’re driving west, but just spectacular if you’re on foot. I first noticed it many years ago, and being an astrologer wondered if there was any significance – the Sun is at about 8 degrees of Gemini on one, about 21 degrees Cancer on the other. What does it mean? What will future archaeologists make of it? Will they discover that they nearly coincided with Memorial Day and the All-Star baseball game? War and the national sport…an insight into the culture?

 

Well, to add fuel to the fire, that long-worshipped summer solstice celebration of the ancients falls exactly between those two days – but, of course, that’s just the nature of the Sun on either side of its north-south journey. But we do have those suspicious celebrations – and lately, the phenomenon has become labeled “Manattanhenge,” so can a dedicated street festival, with fortunetelling booths and a New Age parade be far behind? It may be hard to notice the influence of the stars from our light-polluted night skies, but this one’s a no-brainer…let’s celebrate! If you live here, or are visiting either day, mark it on your calendar!

 

You can see a nice pic and more technical explanation from Neil Tyson at AMNH, who noticed it only lately…

Book Review: The Complete Book of Chart Rectification

The Complete Book of Chart Rectification, by Carol A. Tebbs, M.A., C.A.P., Llewellyn Publications, 2008.

 

Probably the diciest job any astrologer has to do is to rectify a horoscope’s exact time if it appears to be incorrect or to determine one if it is not known at all. That is both important – because so much about a chart is told by the angles and house placements – and tricky, because there are many ways to go about figuring the real time, and often there are several times that seem to be equally good candidates.

 

Worse, even when you have an exact time on a birth certificate, it still probably needs rectification. Why? For several reasons. Often even a hospital certificate will be rounded off to the quarter hour, suggesting that it was simply an afterthought once the birth was taken care of. And even when it’s very precise, it often needs to be pushed back a bit because a doctor’s version of when you are born is not always first breath (when you become a separate system with a beginning) but when he’s decided that you are fully clear of any accompanying birth uncertainties and are ready to be declared irreversibly alive, even if you’d been sputtering along for some minutes already. So, even when you’ve got what looks to be a no-fail exact time on a certificate, you’ll still need to check to see if the chart it produces has dovetailed with known subsequent events, just to be sure.

 

The traditional approach to rectification is pretty standard and simple in theory, though dauntingly complex in application. Get a list of dates for as many important (preferably traumatic) events relating to the individual concerned and see what transits, progressions, or directions turn up at those times. If there is a recurring pattern that isn’t too obviously tied to the individual planets or Lights, then you can conclude that something is happening to the angles, and you can deduce them (and the birth time) from there. Essentially, it’s number-crunching detective work that computers might do best (except for their noted lack of subtle judgment), but which ultimately the astrologer must oversee and decide what the best fits are, then chase down further clues and events until the conclusion is reached.

 

In order to succeed at that, you have to have a very specific plan, method, and order of operations, and in her new book Carol Tebbs nicely introduces you to all three. After a general introduction and overview of what it’s all about, she wisely advises you to play your most likely hunches (well, you would, anyway) before getting down to methodical searches for matches between events and different possible versions of a chart. Then she uses a variety of individual charts as examples, ranging from famous time twins Elizabeth Taylor and Johnny Cash to less well-known figures, with stepwise analyses of how their times were produced from life events. Events are inspected with a view to their significance using transits, progressions, directions, and a variety of fine-tuning within those methods, including declinations, combinations of long-term cycles, and lots more. Specific methods more friendly to one or another popular astro-software programs and how to use them are included, as well.

 

And, should you get lost, you’ll be found again (sometimes for the first time) reading the FAQ section, in which the author not only condenses but expands upon her overview of how the whole thing works, with observational tips and shortcuts about cycle speeds and durations that will help you avoid needless searching and pinpoint your target times. The book is probably worth the price for that section alone.

 

Left unresolved at the end is the perennial problem of which hard aspect do you favor at the finish – is a square going to tell the story as much as a conjunction or opposition? That’s hard to crack and unique to each horoscope, and probably the reason that the U.S.A. chart has several possible birth times popular among astrologers, most of them with mutable angles, since it is transits through the mutables that seem to have told most of the nation’s historical story.

 

For obvious reasons of clarity, the book leaves out some of the more off-the-wall approaches, though it mentions a few like physical appearance, relocation, dwads, eclipses, prenatal epochs, degree symbolism, and more, nor does it delve into the finer points of theory and applications as does Lary Ely’s fine piece in Astrology’s Special Measurements (Llewellyn, 1993, Noel Tyl editor). It doesn’t even mention horary or degree-clustering approaches, nor the frequency of a person’s angles turning up in the charts of surrounding friends and family or daily events, both of which can bring palpable returns but are fairly new on the astrological horizon.

 

All in all, however, you’re not likely to find a more careful and thorough approach to rectification in a single volume, and if you digest all that’s here, you’ll have a pretty thorough understanding of mainstream thought on the subject. Apply that first, and if that doesn’t suffice, you can then go further afield.

 

The author can be reached at: CarolTebbs@aol.com

A Fortuneteller Told Me

 

by Tiziano Terzani, Three Rivers Press, NY.

 

Learning astrology is not just about astrologers learning technique from others, but learning about the context of their art and craft, both historically and geographically. What does it mean to go to an astrologer in different cultures (like, who is your audience?) and how do other practitioners from totally different traditions and upbringings treat the same needs and demands from those who come to them? Why, indeed, does anyone consult you and what are their expectations, fears, and experiences?

 

Here’s an example. What if you went to a well-known, reputable astrologer and were told that the chances of your dying in a plane crash were extremely high for the next year? Would you laugh in the face of it like you might in the face of a physician who told you you’d die if you didn’t quit smoking, and this very year? What would rule your feelings and actions – fear, reason, probability, actual daily choices? That’s the kind of situation any client faces when any astrologer makes any judgment, and the astrologer shares responsibility as well.

 

And that’s exactly what happened to Der Spiegel magazine’s Southeast Asian correspondent Tiziano Terzani a few years ago when he by chance visited a local, well-respected astrologer and was told an airplane crash was in the cards in the next year. His response to it changed his whole life (perhaps saved it, as the journalist-filled helicopter he would have been on did indeed crash later that year), as he chose to stay on the ground for a year and pay the price for not flying along with the rest. In the process, while engaged on the land and at sea in endless journeys and fascinating local color he would have flown over otherwise, he made a point of consulting every astrologer and other fortuneteller he could find along the way and then committing the experience to print.

 

The result is a delightfully entertaining and colorful reading experience for any travel reader, but particularly enlightening for anyone who has been in astrology or any other aspect of ancillary fortunetelling businesses. After all, as a seeker, what an authority tells you produces an endless stream of inner questioning and outer probability-gathering that can take over your whole life. And, as Terzani found out, that authority can range in both believability and accuracy (not at all necessarily the same), depending upon the approach, technique, and philosophy of the practitioner. The same goes for the strategy of the advisee and how the advice is considered and applied. It’s a real can of worms, insightfully explored and adventurously applied by the author to the experience at hand.

 

The entire travel epic is laid against the sometimes footweary background of a tumultuous, changing Southeast Asia where traditional wisdom and lore is being daily supplanted by money and power, rank consumerism and social and ecological destruction. Some of what the author saw and experienced is already extinct, only a few years later, which makes one mourn. But other inner aspects seem to be totally tenacious, from greater philosophical approaches to tiny details. Western astrologers will be perhaps condescendingly amused by the inclination of clients (and their encouraging advisors) to take certain parts of forecasting over-specifically. If one is told to expect death (tomb) from hanging (execution), perhaps hanging a few lamps in your ancestors’ tombs would put fate off the track and satisfy the prophecy. Ancient Classical Western tales are full of such transpositions, though we may now mock it at our peril. It’s still commonplace over there, and there are plentiful palm-nut crops being grown in Burma that never would have been planted but for just such advice, as only last year’s news reveals.

 

In the end, the issues are existential in the extreme, and any astrologer should be prepared to answer every one this Western journalist on foot in Asia has asked. What are the real possibilities at any moment, and how much input does the individual have in addressing them? Fate and free will are not abstract issues here, but daily choices on the ground that have to be answered in multiple languages with sometimes potentially lethal results (as with this his astrologer-described near-death experience with the Khmer Rouge). Life and death are only an instant apart, and your perception of them is no more than a dream in the tropical heat until that dream suddenly comes true, as predicted. Got to read this one…

 

P.S. Not accidentally, I’m sure, this book was given to me by a wise and introspective astrological client born not far from these climes, and I am grateful for the window I might have otherwise missed entirely…