Rational Astrology
Someone recently told me that astrology is somehow "irrational", therefore it is suspect.
As if rationality were the entire swath of valuable human conscious capacity. As if there were not entirely intuitive, bizarre and mysterious aspects even to the most seemingly rational "scientific" discoveries.
Rationality is only a small (but vital) part of human consciousness. To say rationality is the tip of the iceberg of our consciousness massively underestimates the size and scope of the iceberg.
Today, we are suffering a crisis of irrational belief in materialist scientism.
Astrology is a rational metaphorical language that makes sense of frequency, light, speed and direction of heavenly bodies and correlates those things to terrestrial human realities, both EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL (these are not really distinct from one another).
What is within, is without; what is above, is below.
Even most dry “science” operates on some metaphorical framework or else we cannot relate to it or understand it, just as astrology does.
For example, in order to understand how the nervous system works, we need a story about internal processes that we can relate to. We need actors in a territory that conspire to create any particular state ( sound familiar?) - but what source consciousness set up this naturalistic process in the first place? Is that not the greatest mystery? Any explanation of the workings of the nervous system that we can give today lives in a paradigm of thought and is bounded by the accepted paradigm. Previous explanations are not necessarily untrue, they simply have been replaced by the present paradigm.
Astrology was prominent within ancient scientific paradigms, it was a living and breathing force that helped shape human consciousness within our world. It was not perfect, nor am I advocating an atavistic return to a halcyon past which does not exist. But astrology was not “abandoned” because of irrationality or any kind of failure- consciousness itself always provides its own limits. Astrology was central to naturalistic pagan paradigms that were suppressed by statists and ideologues who saw it as a threat to their power. However, groups such as the Jesuits continued to use astrology throughout their history as an inner door practice that was forbidden to the hoy palloi.
The clarity, intuition, empathy, creativity and pattern reading ability of the astrologer (as is true of the scientist, or any profession) are absolutely key to the mystery of their accuracy and productivity. In a consultation, the willingness of the querent to speak their truth and work together with the astrologer is completely necessary to create the fruit of divination.
Astrology was traditionally correlated with medicine and almanac functions, among other things which we now turn almost exclusively to modern science for. However, we can and must work to extend the metaphors of astrology into areas that may seem disparate because consciousness does not honor boundaries- a good metaphor is a good metaphor, and we as practitioners must hone our metaphors constantly. If we attempt to wall off astrology from other ways to knowing the world, our metaphors become truncated and isolated within our echo chamber. Who cares if people think it irrational?