The practice of astrology
With regards to astrology, my thoughts have primarily revolved around the question of how it can actually serve as a “liberating art”—to employ Robert Schmidt’s way of speaking. While this includes philosophical understanding, it must also include some sense of astrology as a practice—and by this, I don’t mean primarily a consultation practice, but a personal practice. What do we do with astrology? What is the most beneficial way of being in relation to astrology? How do we liberate ourselves through the practice of astrology, and of what, exactly, does such a practice consist?
While the world is said to be round with a more or less even surface upon which we all stand, I feel this is mirage and that a truer vision of the world comes to light if we imagine its surface heavily pocked with craters of such depth and number that each of us exist within the isolation of a single crater with seemingly unscalable sides. All material activities we partake of, like marbles spun around a bowl, dispel their energy and come back to settle at the bottom. On occasion, by some great effort (or divine intervention), a marble manages to escape, but only to find itself coming to rest at the bottom of another hole.
The purpose of all liberating arts is thus to help us scale the side, to allow us escape from the isolating gravity of our individual holes. This must be the primary purpose of astrology if we’re to consider it a liberating art—that it function as a ladder, a scaffolding upon which we can climb out of and above our identification with the isolating particularities of our individual experience. Otherwise it’s just more weight holding us down.
And, once the side is scaled, astrology must be light enough to all but discard. For the true surface of the world, so pocked, consists of razors’ edges where adjacent craters meet. There is no flat ground above all. The liberated soul is first and foremost a balancing artist who walks along edges, skirting the holes. What little he continues to hold while walking upon the edge must be light and agile less it compromise his balance and send him tumbling back down a hole. And so, it seems to me, astrology must expand itself in such way that its tuitional dogma ever lightens the more conversant one becomes, the scaffolding that seemed so structured and weighty at the bottom transforming into something lighter than memory at the top.
In this way, the aim of astrology must be its own transcendence, something its philosophy cannot contain but only note. The map itself can never be the place it depicts. And so the question of how one practises astrology becomes all-important, for balance is something we learn by feel.