The Transneptunian Massacre…

Alfred Witte

Today I wish to examine certain of the so-called Transneptunians, those hypothetical points proposed by Alfred Witte, founder of the Hamburg School during the 1920s and 1930s. The fact that the Transneptunian points are not known to physically exist was as much a problem for astrologers back then as it is for some today; indeed, as a result of the widespread ridicule he received for these theories and his subsequent disfavour with the Nazi regime, Witte committed suicide in 1941.

I am challenged with the view that these points are meaningless often, and I reject the argument that these points are therefore ineffective. The immateriality of the TNPs is a conundrum, but I have never overvalued the concrete especially thus far in life, so I do not tend to struggle with this dilemma. Such material logic contests that cars have greater intrinsic value than love. So, I test the theory instead and try not to become too entangled in the dimensions of the real.

I find that without question, the TNPs are true, powerful and profoundly useful and in order to demonstrate this validity, I am going to look in some depth at the case of Martin Bryant, the perpetrator of the Port Arthur Massacre in Tasmania in 1996, where Bryant, acting alone and with apparent premeditation, gunned down 35 bystanders in a bloody rampage at a popular Tasmanian tourist spot, just days before his 29th birthday. There is a great deal of pertinent and useful background information available in this case and if you are interested in some of the finer detail then you should read this article from Australian news source The Age; video recounting the tragedy is available from Youtube.

Even without knowing Bryant’s story, we can apprehend a number of intriguing qualities that are suggested by these configurations:

• Saturn rises, isolation is therefore a theme of this life story, and with Saturn in fall and near aspectually peregrine, the planet will struggle to express its quality.
• Mars is in profound difficulty, in fall, within the boundary of the 8th, he is also slow, retrograde and occidental. Mars is therefore struggling and this is key, any archetype which has no route into manifestation will become uncomfortable and might threaten to overwhelm the nativity (and in the case of Mars, that would surely result in an act of violence, or a habit of episodic violence).
• Chiron rises (not shown) and thus forms a grand water trine which includes the chart ruler Neptune in the 9th. Here is a closed circuit of emotional self-sufficiency that will only increase the isolation implicit in Saturn rising. Whereas – for the majority – a grand trine might be a refuge, in this case it would certainly be of borderline benefit, making something of a prison of the life. In the years leading up to the incident Bryant travelled extensively:

In the two years to the end of 1995, Bryant visited Europe six times and the US and South-East Asia three times, as well as New Zealand and Japan. The summary of his domestic travel over the same period would take three pages to list, travelling to Queensland and South Australia but most often to Melbourne, where he loved the zoo. But had the travel filled the void? No, he would tell Professor Mullen: “Mr Bryant stated that the best part of his international trips was the long plane journey. It transpired that the attraction of the long aeroplane journey was that he could speak to the people next to him, who presumably being strapped to their seats had no choice but to at least appear friendly. Mr Bryant became quite animated in describing some of what he regarded as the more successful interactions with fellow travellers.

• Bryant loved animals (he travelled repeatedly to the Melbourne zoo) but also kept a fair menagerie of pets. The asteroid Diana rises, a degree into the 1st house. Keeping pets was therefore part of his identity and how he related to the world. To others though, this just made him appear strange as he would drive around with dogs, birds – even the occasional small pony – in his car. It exacerbated his isolation from normal society.
• In the chart the asteroid Sappho falls at the midpoint of Neptune and Ascendant, the Sappho-Neptune trine is exact to less than 50 seconds of arc! He loved to talk (Asc) to fellow passengers (Sappho) while travelling to exotic (Neptune) foreign destinations (in the 9th). This is a typical trine arrangement, enjoyment is subjectively experienced when the factors are combined.
• One of the most fascinating aspects of Bryant’s life before the Port Arthur massacre was his relationship with Helen Harvey a wealthy heiress who lived alone with her mother. Bryant befriended her after she employed him to be their handyman.

The two misfits forged a bond… The tragic consequences of their relationship, however, began early. As the friendship moved from employer-employee to friends and then constant companions, Helen’s mother, Hilza, was left increasingly alone inside what was fast becoming a filthy hell hole. She had been moved downstairs into the kitchen at some stage, and it was here that the old woman was forced to sleep, upright in a chair, writhing and wriggling in a bid to gain relief from an undiagnosed and untreated broken hip for most of the last two years of her life.

In June 1990, after someone made a report to the health authorities, medics arrived to find both Hilza and Helen in need of urgent hospital treatment with infected leg ulcers and living in squalor in the kitchen, surrounded not only by roaming animals, but unwashed dishes and saucepans and bowls with mould so high it was climbing out of the oven.

Seventy-nine-year-old Hilza Harvey was an abject horror of neglect, sitting untended with her broken hip and withering slowly in the kitchen on her chair.

Martin Bryant

This is where the Transneptunians begin to make their play: Hades is in Bryant’s nativity Cazimi, which means that it finds a pure expression; it becomes an unadulterated facet of identity, and the themes of Hades are to do with all things unpleasant, squalid, unwholesome, there are qualities of slow decay, gradual disintegration and decline, encroaching morbidity and general and pervasive unpleasantness; it is exactly the kind of squalor described which was visited upon Helen Harvey’s mother. Sun – Hades is to be involved with instances of lingering illness and wasting disease. The Cazimi conjunction applies to the 3rd and describes the gradual deterioration of those mental faculties which became apparent as he grew older in childhood. Something was ‘wrong’ with Martin Bryant, but that realisation was slowly revealed.

And then there is the astoundingly close conjunction between Mars, Cupido and Poseidon. We already understand that Mars is deeply awkward in this position and any Martian expression will inevitably be blended with the flavours and influences of Cupido and Poseidon. If we join these ideas together we have a complex impetus:

Mars/Libra/8: an inability to confront, wanting to negotiate anger (but with deteriorating mental faculties: no way out!), sudden outbursts, a need to control outcomes in partnership, ruled by Venus in the 4th, the father a pacifying influence (his father Maurice, committed suicide in 1993: Stella Sampson, his former teacher, would later tell the media: “My personal view is that his dad kept him in check, and when he died he didn’t have that restraining influence any longer.”) Mars rules Saturn rising, that anger held in check contributes, creates his isolation (“The kids were wary of him,” one neighbour would recount. “They understood instinctively that he was someone to stay away from. He was just a little scary.”)

Then Mars is conjunct Cupido: and Cupido has associations with partnership, family history, group involvements, it certainly ramps up the Libran energy in this placement, no doubt inhibiting the natural expression of Mars still further. There is an acute awareness of family conflict here, what happened in childhood that limited the natural expression of Martian energy?

By the time Martin was 16 months old, however, he was not only walking but running, climbing – and escaping – and his mother was starting to find it difficult to cope… He would disappear regularly from their house, his parents finding him in the strangest places, once on top of the chook pen next door or even further afield, playing quietly on a swing way across the other side of the railway line that ran north from Hobart along the Derwent’s western foreshore.

Martin Bryant was not the first toddler to love wandering, to show a spirit for adventure or levels of energy that could try a saint. But his mum’s response was an unusual one: “I started to leave him on the house veranda, with a harness and lead to secure him, with plenty of toys all around him. Some person made a complaint about us tying him up like a dog. But of course as his mother, I knew he was happy and safe.”

Mars is conjunct Poseidon: and this creates a very unusual blend, Poseidon attests to one’s spiritual ideal (but retrograde! A lack of spiritual ideals could result, the code is missing), and with Mars in Libra and the 8th, there is this sense that committing violence toward the other person might be in some way spiritually liberating, but remember the entire group is ruled by Venus, it is held together by the father and when he exits the picture (Venus squares Uranus (suddenly!) and Chiron in Pisces (Suicide, drugs and water, Maurice Bryant drowned himself after taking an overdose!))

And of course Cupido conjuncts Poseidon too: and the result is a philosophy or ideal based on a family history that seeks to avoid conflict, to hold violence in check, to negotiate anger rather than deal with it. Father dies, all bets are off. Can you feel these combinations? Violence held in check by the father, because of a family conditioning, because of being leashed and a lack of a spiritual or moral code.

Taurus finds its way into the life arc uncannily. He became the lifelong companion of Helen Harvey, they bought a house together and named it Taurusville! She died after the car they were both in crashed, her neck broken. He broke two vertebrae in his neck as well. She left him a millionaire, he had become enormously wealthy through the death of the only person who would give him companionship, he became further isolated. The Port Arthur massacre loomed.

The fateful day arrives.

Bryant has provided conflicting and confused accounts of what led him to kill 35 people at the Port Arthur site on 28 April 1996. It appears his desire for attention (he allegedly told a next door neighbour “I’ll do something that will make everyone remember me”), as well as mounting frustration at his social isolation (Saturn) had made him unbearably angry (Mars – ruler of Saturn!).

His first victims, David and Sally Martin, owned the B & B guest house “Seascape”. Bryant later described them as “very mean people” and as “the worse people in my life”. The Martins had bought the B & B that Bryant’s father had wanted to buy and he often complained to his son of the “double dealing” the Martins had done to secure the purchase. Bryant apparently believed the Martins had deliberately bought the property to hurt his family and blamed the Martins for the depression that led to his father’s death (Cupido – Mars, anger through family history, but held in check byt he father). He shot them in that guest house before traveling to the Port Arthur ruins. Bryant entered The Broad Arrow Café on the historical site’s grounds, carrying a large blue duffel bag. Upon sitting down to eat a meal in the front balcony area, he remarked “There’s a lot of wasps (Mars) about today” to no one in particular. Once he finished, Bryant moved towards the back of the café and set a video camera on a vacant table. He took out an AR15 semi-automatic rifle (Mars) and began shooting patrons and staff. Within a matter of seconds, he had killed 20 people and wounded 15. He then fled, shooting at people in the parking lot and from his yellow Volvo sedan as he drove away. Bryant drove three hundred metres down the road, to where a woman and her two children were walking. He stopped and fired two shots killing the woman and the child she was carrying. The older child fled, but Bryant followed her and killed her with a single shot. He then stole a gold-coloured BMW by killing the occupants. A short distance down the road he stopped beside a couple in a white Toyota and, drawing his weapon, ordered the male occupant into the trunk of the BMW. After shutting the trunk he fired two shots into the windshield of the Toyota, killing the female driver. He returned to the guest house, set the stolen car alight (Mars) and took his hostage inside with the Martins’ corpses (Hades). The police soon arrived and tried to negotiate with Martin for many hours before the battery in the phone Bryant was using died, ending communication. Bryant’s only demand was to be transported in an army helicopter to an airport. Sometime during the negotiations, Bryant killed his hostage.

The next morning, 18 hours later, Bryant set fire (Mars) to the guest house and attempted to escape in the confusion. Suffering burns (Mars) to his back and buttocks, he was captured and taken to Royal Hobart Hospital where he was treated and kept under heavy guard.

And all this seems very straightforward until you realise that the Mars/Cupido/Poseidon conjunction applied to partile opposition of the Sun/Hades conjunction by Solar Arc in 1996.

1. Poseidon opp. Sun, SA-Na (28 January)
2. Poseidon opposition Hades (15 March 1996)
3. Port Arthur massacre (28th April 1996)
4. Mars opposition Sun (5 May 1996)

Within a week of the Solar Arc oppositions completing, Bryant had murdered 35 people in cold blood.

(NB: The influence of Poseidon is especially odd in my view since it is normally associated with enlightening qualities. Is it simply a coincidence then that Fred West, the British serial killer had Poseidon Cazimi? And what does Hades look like? Here is former US Senator Gary Hart: Hades rising in Aries, exactly conj. Asc.)

 

New Asteroids Service

Today Saturn crosses my Ascendant and not a moment too soon, I haven’t known whether I’m on foot or horseback for as long as I can remember, and with that transition out of the 12th, well, I feel like a prisoner on release day.

I’ve been working very hard on two projects over the last few months: the first is my book which is progressing very well, although the pressure of work keeps me more distracted from that worthy enterprise than I would like. I have made a very intense study of the minor asteroids over the last days and weeks, and I am at a point where they are creating a very useful narrative, especially for those seeking more subtle insights into their inner drives and in using self-awareness to foster self-improvement.

It is for this reason that I am now able to offer a new Asteroids Report through my Astrology Hour service. I would generally recommend this for those people who have already used my services for their broader nativity, but so long as you are comfortable with your major themes, then I believe it will be extremely useful.

Of course, I cannot and would not attempt to look at the asteroids in isolation, it will still key into the major raison d’etre of your nativity, so in a very real sense, it is a fine-tuning process, a way of adding detail, colour and texture to the broad strokes of your astrological perspective.

If you would be interested, the report will be (as per my normal approach) a hand-written discussion of the themes and ramifications of the asteroids in your nativity, and will vary in length, but I would aim to write around 3000 words in the final document and you can email me directly with any questions, or alternatively, just jump right in and make your order at Astrology Hour.

 

Erisian Elusiveness, Plutonic Potential

Here is an interesting idea.

Eris, Goddess of Discord, so named after being more or less directly responsible for the declassification of Pluto as a genuine planet and his reclassification as a ‘dwarf planet’ – if anyone is going to take Pluto down a notch or two it had to be Eris (the sister of Ares no less) – does not roll in a conventional orbit; she is differently inclined.

Which means that for long periods of her very slow perambulation around the Sun, she is far from the traditional ecliptic of the Zodiac; certainly, she makes an appearance in the Zodiac: in the sign of Pisces and Aries, (where she resides now from the astrological perspective) but in truth, she spends most of her time in realms far off the ecliptic and, heliocentrically speaking, has as her backdrop the constellation of Cetus. She’ll make a foray into Aries (and thus into the plane of the zodiacal ecliptic in 2065.)

What does this mean? The phenomenon of precession means that there is no absolute correlation between the physical zodiacal ecliptic and that which we use for casting nativities, but the planets do fall nonetheless in the same plane of the ecliptic. Eris is not at this time (nor at any point since her discovery has she been) in the zodiac at all.

Does this mean that Eris has no power until she falls into the scope of the ecliptical vibration? I certainly do not feel her influence (and I am not denouncing her for that is hubris), but I cannot make a case for the Erisian archetypes in a mundane nativity. Alternately, is she operating from an archetypal perspective that falls somewhat off kilter; Cetus is between and beyond the general region between Aquarius and Pisces; and might that explain how her influence is felt?

We do not wake up to the complex and far-distant archetypes easily. I see how completely Pluto has made his presence felt in human life of course, but it was not always so. The Wall Street crash of 1929 (financial wipeout) heralded his arrival, and the creation of an atomic bomb followed quickly, but it has taken a great deal of development to realise the transformative potential of Hades. What is truly wonderful is the understanding that with Pluto’s discovery our very beings were invested with a transformative potential! Previously, our astrology was fixed, now we are all waking up to the power to transform! Such a great gift was not even available to our great-grandparents, they were more or less cursed by the stars (or blessed of course), but now, if we are prepared to take the journey into the underworld (which is the monomyth as described by Joseph Campbell), then we can emerge, like Theseus from the labyrinth, one step nearer to our soul’s objective: Solar self-fulfilment. What a profound gift, and that too is Pluto of course: a gift beyond wealth!

So, I doubt I will make it to 2065 and I’m really not sure I’d want to, except for the interest of being able to see if there is a newly emergent Erisian reality at that time. There is so much to look forward to. Long before that the New Horizons probe will reach Pluto (on 14 July 2015, but surely it is taken as read that you shouldn’t peek into Hades’ realm?) And Regulus moves into Virgo in 2011!

So much to do, so much to get worked out, so many problems to fix (and that’s just my own!)

 

On the Employment of Politicians

Imagine that you are a king or queen that rules over a vast and fertile country. On the day of your coronation your subjects are happy, prosperous and the land is blessed. Like all good monarchs you desire to do your very best for your country and so, recognising your relative inexperience, you hire the most revered and respected statesman in the kingdom to be your most trusted advisor. There is no matter of policy that you do not seek his view upon, no decision taken that has not had his influence upon it and his reports from all around the kingdom indicate that your rule, and his beneficent advices have created a fair and just society that continues to prosper, where the people are safe and happy, and you are revered amongst the common folk as a wise and gentle ruler. One day you awake and call your advisor to council only to discover that he is fled with your treasure and the people are rising up against you. Years of oppressive rule, famine and disease have pushed them beyond all endurance and the mob calls for your blood in the streets outside the palace gate. Your end is violent, terrifying and swift.

It is not a pleasant vision, and yet it is the story of nearly every human life that employs a tricky politician to be their most trusted advisor. If the mind is your advisor, and it most likely is, then you are already in dire straits though you may not know it; because he cannot be trusted, he does not have your best interest at heart, only his own and though he will tell you that your kingdom is in good order and that the people love you he does not truly know, because his reports are all based on lazy informants and besides, he is too busy coveting the gold to worry overmuch about the world outside. You may well realise his treachery just before the end and bitter indeed will be your last moments as you finally comprehend the folly of your entire reign, you who employed a politician to give you advice. The mind will tell you just what is designed to safeguard its own position, influence and prosperity, irrespective of whether that be the truth or not. The mind will tell you that you are happy and respected even as you are miserable and considered a laughing stock by others. There is no degradation that the mind would not hide from you to further its own design.

This then is the ultimate danger. Given the task of self-regulation the mind – like many a politician – will overstep its boundaries and a little corruption will creep in. It will take campaign funds from some lobbyist or special interest group, or it will ignore the plight of some disadvantaged minority in order to better serve the interests of business and with time and the gradual erosion of any objective standard of behaviour it will become as aristocratic and depraved as any Borgia. Has any man’s final thought in this world been to mull over the value of his property portfolio or the profitability of his investments? And yet these are the obsessions of an entire life, exposed at the last gasp as a cheap imitation of value.

The human mind is a politician; predisposed to cleverness and corruption alike. You believe its every declaration at your eternal peril.

 

Describing the Indescribable

In my last post I discussed the problem with Mercury and made a case for something else. I would not wish to posit a specific astrological entity for the other awareness, it no doubt lies at the centre of your nativity, the place you are drawn to if you are prepared to suffer a little or a lot, or repelled by, if you are otherwise. This otherness is entirely Chirotic, in my view.

And should we find ourselves in pursuit of this ‘other’ faculty that is not the mind, not the feelings and not the body either, we might well ask, “what is it?”. Well, it is a sense of rightness. It is an innate and non-intellectual understanding of things. It has a deeper and more profound sense of conviction than opinion and it informs our experience, our morals and our true sense of self. This principle is easily demonstrable; imagine stealing money from your friend while their back is turned and examine your reaction to the commission of such an act. It does not feel comfortable of course and there is a deep and profound sense of wrongness attached to the action but you will notice that you don’t simply ‘think’ it is wrong; you feel it. If it were an intellectual understanding then it follows that the more intelligent you are, the more moral you would be and that is clearly a nonsense. Indeed, if you wanted to posit a generalisation, you might very well be able to make a case for the opposite truth! Clearly, the mind has no real influence on the morals other than to work very hard at defeating them.

This presents us with a classification problem, not least because we are trying to describe something that does not lend itself to intellectualisation. This is partly because it lies some way above the mind and the mind is not really aware of it all that much, but beyond this it is – for the most part – indescribable.

The usual stratagem is to use a blanket term that satisfies the mind’s propensity for trivialising anything that is not of itself and call this other faculty “the feelings”, although this is clearly misleading too, because whilst a moral sense is apprehensible, it is not particularly felt; certainly not in the way that physicality or the emotions are felt. Thus language rather runs out, but we should not be surprised by this. Language is the medium of the mind after all, and once we move beyond the mind it has no grasp of the tenuous qualities of these strange quasi-mystical environs. We should additionally not be surprised since the numbers of travellers in this rarefied realm are so few and so far between and for the most part they are not ‘men of science’ in particular because they are off in another direction altogether, marching to an entirely different beat.
And this is where the inner path bears no admittance to the sacristy of proof so revered by scientists, if it cannot even be described how much further away is that from the minimum requirement for measurement and analysis? It simply will not do, the hocus-pocus of garden gnomes is as intelligible.

Only for scientists is such explicit vulgarity so enshrined. However, the poet has no such retardation with which to contend and he is free to make an attempt at it, not by creating some improbable taxonomy of labels but rather by invoking the non-mind itself to grasp the fleeting tenets of this unknowable kingdom. Poetry itself is a method of describing the indescribable.

It goes without saying that not all poetry is so inclined, nor that all poetry that attempts it succeeds. But it is inarguable that poetry does invoke in the non-mind of the reader a certain irrefutable awareness of things simply by conjuring a vision or sense of non-intellectual understanding through the exposition of sympathetic themes. This is not disputable even though it is hardly considered an outright definition of the poet’s craft, and from cultures as wildly varying as those which fostered the poetic gifts of Basho and Keats, the common thread of attuning the higher sense with the exact same language – albeit differently configured – that fails to classify it is uncovered. This must not be a mystery to the student of the inner path. It is a truth, and a love for poetry ought to be a sign or indicator of one who is comfortable with the arena of the non-mind. Those who do not ‘get it’ are reading it entirely with their minds after all; seeking literal description rather than the prayer or spell of invocation; because poetry, like prayer, is meaningless to the unbeliever and the mind is incapable of faith. Its only currency is knowledge.

A student of the inner path then should attempt to read poetry. They might even have a go at writing it. There can certainly be no harm in such activity and the potential it nurtures for easing access to the non-mind is invaluable. Any method that increases our familiarity with this most tenuous of realms is beyond value because by it we might realise wealth.

 

Life is more complex than we can “know.”

Every day I get messages from people who are struggling to understand the world they inhabit. Why does this happen? Why is my life so difficult? They suggest that if they could only understand it, they would see a “way out.” If my years spent counselling people through their struggles has taught me one thing though, it is that the only route out of adversity is to stop thinking. I would write more on this subject if there were much interest in it: so my usual recourse is to implicate these conclusions within the scope of an astrological treatise; it is after all, one and the same philosophy. The mind crudely simplifies the astoundingly complex reality it perceives in order to render it manageable, to make it comparative. He is evil. She is a saint. My figure is worse than hers. My motives are good. His are bad. The mind cannot even adequately comprehend our own subjective reality, let alone anyone else’s.

The simplifying tendency of the human mind points to one very stark observation; and that is that without question we cannot know very much. Certainly we can know some things, but the majority of human knowledge is entirely superficial. If you were to take a single subject, like electricity, or fighter planes of World War Two, or the French Revolution, there may be some questions that we could answer on all of those subjects but our understanding would be superficial. Beyond this you might argue that your mind bestows you with the potential to become an expert, but even then there are only so many subjects in which you could ever hope to gain true expertise. Maybe you could study hard and learn everything there is to know about electricity. If you were exceptionally intelligent and studious you might be able to learn another subject to a high standard and become an expert in two domains; perhaps even three, but ultimately, the scope of expertise that the vast majority of us could ever aspire to is almost trivial when compared with the sum total of human knowledge, never mind the sum total of all things in creation that might bear scrutiny. This underlines the plain truth that – if you want to be comparative – we know almost nothing and we can’t hope to improve on that very much no matter how much effort we make. Put simply, the human mind’s capacity to understand the universe is mostly inconsequential.

This is not to say that it is not fit for purpose; rather that it is not fit to the purpose of understanding the universe. If you believe that you can somehow understand the entirety of creation by intellectually deconstructing it then you are deluded. Beyond this, even expertise has its limits. We understand much as a species, but our understandings when measured against our lack of understandings pale into insignificance. Take any subject in some hard, quantifiable subject like science and you soon begin to realise that in many ways we are just scratching the surface of understanding and our seeming insights are often supported upon the probability that we simply do not know enough to know what questions to ask. Can we predict the weather? A little perhaps, but not much. Can we cure the common cold? Why does the sun exist? What is the universe made of? Why do humans have fewer genes than some flowers? And these are all questions for science in the sense that they are easily quantified and are thus sympathetic to the investigative medium. What is love? Why are some people insane? What is insanity? What is sanity? Why are we here? What happens after we die? The scientific mind cannot even begin to frame other questions, let alone answer them.

So what is the point here? It is that our exaltation of the mind is based upon the entirely false assumption that the mind is capable of producing anything truly meaningful in our lives, because we cannot ever truly know anything meaningful by using the mind. Certainly we can know something useful or something interesting, but that is really the best we can hope for. We might look with intrigue at the results of the Mars explorer expedition and wonder that there appear to once have been rivers and seas on the red planet’s surface, but does it really matter? Is it going to change us in any profound and powerful way to know these answers?

And this is true of anything else as well. Do the enlightening wonders of science and intellectual understanding make the world a better place? Does our thorough and precise understanding of the mechanics of bodily nutrition benefit the millions that die annually from hunger and disease in Africa? Does our statistical grasp of the afflictions of poverty in inner cities eradicate poverty in inner cities? Does our social and medical insight into the ravages of violent crime curb violent crime? Quite simply we are promoting the wrong agenda; listening to the sunset. Intellectualising our place in the universe is like shooting the moon; our aim may be true but we can never hope to reach our target, our best effort will always fall short: massively and hopelessly short simply because the human mind is not a powerful enough instrument. It is much better employed in deciding whether to take the high or low road home on a foggy December night, or whether to stick or twist in the card game. That’s the kind of task it was specifically designed for, after all.

In all of the ways that matter to the human condition, in the eradication of suffering and the promotion of happiness the mind is not much use at all. It can tell us that people suffer because they do not get enough food to eat, or because they cannot afford fuel, but it cannot ‘do’ anything about it; rather it treats life as an interesting puzzle that must be worked out, then it intellectualises everything else based on its inescapably feeble grasp of the contingencies. The end result of this process is a rather vague opinion of matters and not a great deal of insight.

Insight requires another awareness entirely. The person who has worked many years at a particular skill or profession might be able to convey the mundane facts of their process of work without knowing how to even begin to convey the insight that results from their many years of experience. It is the kind of understanding that is not contained in the mind; which is exactly why it cannot be verbalised. If this fact were anything but true then experience would not count for much. The refined reasoning that is developed over an entire career is the most valuable of commodities in the carrying on of trades and yet it is precisely so valuable because it cannot be taught and cannot be learned by the mind. It is another faculty entirely.

Without even looking into this other faculty at all, it should be pre-eminently obvious that the mind has its limits; and they are in many ways less impressive than our most pessimistic imaginings.

This simplifying tendency of the mind points to one very stark observation; and that is that without question we cannot know very much. Certainly we can know some things, but the majority of human knowledge is entirely superficial. If you were to take a single subject, like electricity, or fighter planes of World War Two, or the French revolution, there may be some questions that we could answer on all of those subjects but our understanding would be superficial. Beyond this you might argue that your mind bestows you with the potential to become an expert, but even then there are only so many subjects in which you could ever hope to gain true expertise. Maybe you could study hard and learn everything there is to know about electricity. If you were exceptionally intelligent and studious you might be able to learn another subject to a high standard and become an expert in two domains; perhaps even three, but ultimately, the scope of expertise that the vast majority of us could ever aspire to is almost trivial when compared with the sum total of human knowledge, never mind the sum total of all things in creation that might bear scrutiny. This underlines the plain truth that – if you want to be comparative – we know almost nothing and we can’t hope to improve on that very much no matter how much effort we make. Put simply, the human mind’s capacity to understand the universe is mostly inconsequential.

This is not to say that it is not fit for purpose; rather that it is not fit to the purpose of understanding the universe. If you believe that you can somehow understand the entirety of creation by intellectually deconstructing it then you are deluded. Beyond this, even expertise has its limits. We understand much as a species, but our understandings when measured against our lack of understandings pale into insignificance. Take any subject in some hard, quantifiable subject like science and you soon begin to realise that in many ways we are just scratching the surface of understanding and our seeming insights are often supported upon the probability that we simply do not know enough to know what questions to ask. Can we predict the weather? A little perhaps, but not much. Can we cure the common cold? Why does the sun exist? What is the universe made of? Why do humans have fewer genes than some flowers? And these are all questions for science in the sense that they are easily quantified and are thus sympathetic to the investigative medium. What is love? Why are some people insane? What is insanity? What is sanity? Why are we here? What happens after we die? The scientific mind cannot even begin to frame other questions, let alone answer them.

So what is the point here? It is that our exaltation of the mind is based upon the entirely false assumption that the mind is capable of producing anything truly meaningful in our lives, because we cannot ever truly know anything meaningful by using the mind. Certainly we can know something useful or something interesting, but that is really the best we can hope for. We might look with intrigue at the results of the Mars explorer expedition and wonder that there appear to once have been rivers and seas on the red planet’s surface, but does it really matter? Is it going to change us in any profound and powerful way to know these answers?

And this is true of anything else as well. Do the enlightening wonders of science and intellectual understanding make the world a better place? Does our thorough and precise understanding of the mechanics of bodily nutrition benefit the millions that die annually from hunger and disease in Africa? Does our statistical grasp of the afflictions of poverty in inner cities eradicate poverty in inner cities? Does our social and medical insight into the ravages of violent crime curb violent crime? Quite simply we are promoting the wrong agenda; listening to the sunset. Intellectualising our place in the universe is like shooting the moon; our aim may be true but we can never hope to reach our target, our best effort will always fall short: massively and hopelessly short simply because the human mind is not a powerful enough instrument. It is much better employed in deciding whether to take the high or low road home on a foggy December night, or whether to stick or twist in the card game. That’s the kind of task it was specifically designed for, after all.

In all of the ways that matter to the human condition, in the eradication of suffering and the promotion of happiness the mind is not much use at all. It can tell us that people suffer because they do not get enough food to eat, or because they cannot afford fuel, but it cannot ‘do’ anything about it; rather it treats life as an interesting puzzle that must be worked out, then it intellectualises everything else based on its inescapably feeble grasp of the contingencies. The end result of this process is a rather vague opinion of matters and not a great deal of insight.

[Exercise?] Insight requires another awareness entirely. The person who has worked many years at a particular skill or profession might be able to convey the mundane facts of their process of work without knowing how to even begin to convey the insight that results from their many years of experience. It is the kind of understanding that is not contained in the mind; which is exactly why it cannot be verbalised. If this fact were anything but true then experience would not count for much. The refined reasoning that is developed over an entire career is the most valuable of commodities in the carrying on of trades and yet it is precisely so valuable because it cannot be taught and cannot be learned by the mind. It is another faculty entirely.

Without even looking into this other faculty at all, it should be pre-eminently obvious that the mind has its limits; and they are in many ways less impressive than our most pessimistic imaginings.

 

Chiron in Taurus through the houses, part 1

I apologise for the long absence from writing articles, I have been putting the majority of my energy into writing my book, which is progressing well. Today, due to popular demand, I am going to start looking at the principles of Chiron in Taurus through the houses, which will form a total of four separate articles.

In the most earthy of the signs, Chiron represents the pain of insecurity which manifests into woundedness about the material aspect of Venus. Money, possessions, body image, food, comfort and good living are all configured in this placement. The emphasis in any case is upon all these matters as they affect the sense of being safe in the world, being able to trust the Universe and feel loved in the context of a physical life. Taurus is intractable too, so clinging on to people, situations and possessions is a key trait of this placement, out of fear of losing the security that has been accrued through them. An unquestioning adherence to tradition is another factor, even though with time and self-development, it answers the conundrum of Chiron less and less, until those rituals become empty and effectively meaningless. The hallmark of a struggling Chiron in Taurus is a gradually encroaching suspicion that the material cannot provide the security that is required by the human heart. On a very mundane level, Chiron in Taurus worries about money even when there is plenty of it available.

Chiron in Taurus rising can challenge traditional dress codes

1st House: Here the appearance becomes tied into themes of security, and it might manifest as an obsession with being too stout or an over-reliance on wearing clothes of sufficient quality and value. Designer labels are an easy out for Chiron in Taurus here, since they intimate these characteristics which soothes the ‘wound of image’. Another manifestation might be a requirement to adhere to, or alternately to reject, traditional clothing styles. An example of this latter embodiment of Chiron would be Serena Williams who is renowned both for her unconventional fashion choices during tennis tournaments and who also has her own designer clothes brand ‘Anares’. With Chiron rising in Taurus, the effects are easy to isolate, but the cause is – as always – a sense of deep insecurity: about body image or financial security.

At another level entirely, consider the nativityof Che Guevara, who grew up in a privileged middle-class household in Rosario, Argentina. When he ventured out into the wider world of South America, he was dismayed and motivated by the crushing poverty he witnessed in the remote rural areas of Peru, where peasant farmers worked small plots of land owned by wealthy landlords. The journey became a formative factor in his burgeoning Marxist philosophy which he told to compelling effect in The Motorcycle Diaries. He visited a leper colony during the course of this odyssey and remarked that “the highest forms of human solidarity and loyalty arise among such lonely and desperate people” and this became a major component of his subsequent life philosophy; through his travels of Latin America, he came in “close contact with poverty, hunger and disease” along with the “inability to treat a child because of lack of money” and “stupefaction provoked by the continual hunger and punishment” that leads a father to “accept the loss of a son as an unimportant accident.” The pain of poverty might well be a higher-octave expression of this placement. Guevara was killed by a gunshot wound to the throat, aged 39.

2nd House: This is a double dose of Taurus energy, so the effect of Chiron allied with Venus ought to be especially compelling. The pain of materialism and security is here most relevant and no better example can be found than Johnny Cash, a man who, despite selling over 50 million records during his long and stratospherically successful career, never forgot that he was the son of poor cotton farmers, and these early experiences coloured his outlook irrevocably. In 1944, His older brother, Jack, was pulled into a whirling table saw in the mill where he worked, and cut almost in two. He suffered for over a week before he died. Cash often spoke of the horrible guilt he felt over this incident. According to Cash: The Autobiography, his father was away that morning, but he and his mother, and Jack himself, all had premonitions or a sense of foreboding about that day, causing his mother to urge Jack to skip work and go fishing with his brother. Jack insisted on working, as the family needed the money.Consider also the lyrics to A Satisfied Mind, which ought to be an anthem for Chiron in Taurus and the potential for transforming the wound of Chiron into a gift:

How many times have
You heard someone say
If I had his money
I could do things my way

But little they know
That it’s so hard to find
One rich man in ten
With a satisfied mind

Once I was waitin’
In fortune and fame
Everything that I dreamed for
To get a start in life’s game

Then suddenly it happened
I lost every dime
But I’m richer by far
With a satisfied mind

Money can’t buy back
Your youth when you’re old
Or a friend when you’re lonely
Or a love that’s grown cold

The wealthiest person
Is a pauper at times
Compared to the man
With a satisfied mind

When my life has ended
And my time has run out
My friends and my loved ones
I’ll leave there’s no doubt

But one thing’s for certain
When it comes my time
I’ll leave this old world
With a satisfied mind

How many times have
You heard someone say
If I had his money
I could do things my way

But little they know
That it’s so hard to find
One rich man in ten
With a satisfied mind

When invited to perform at the White House for the first time in 1972, President Richard Nixon’s office requested that he play “Welfare Cadillac” (a Guy Drake song that derides the integrity of welfare recipients) and it was reported that Cash refused to play the song because he apparently considered its standpoint to be morally reprehensible.

3rd House: Here is a placement that suggests one’s intellect, education and learning path was crimped, restricted or failed to reach its proper potential due to material constraints. A person whose working class background denied them access to a good standard of education would be typical of this placement, or somebody who was forced to leave school early because of the need to go out and get a job. With the 3rd house, siblings may have used up the family resources and I have known people with this placement who endured a “brighter” brother or sister being sent to a private school while they had to endure the less exacting (and free) alternative. More broadly, it can also represent an ongoing state of insecurity about one’s mental capability, effectiveness in communication, speech, literacy, numeracy and so forth. Alicia Silverstone who has this placement for example, did not complete her high school studies and gained no formal qualifications. It’s an odds-on bet that she’s sensitive about the issue too. The Plain English Campaign awarded her the annual Foot in Mouth Award in 2000 for her ‘baffling verbal statement’, “I think that Clueless was very deep. I think it was deep in the way that it was very light. I think lightness has to come from a very deep place if it is true lightness,” and at the same time she evidently does have insecurity (Ch/Ta) about her communication (3rd); she once said: “My boyfriend calls me ‘princess’, but I think of myself more along the lines of ‘monkey’ and ‘retard’” Intriguingly, she is a fluent French speaker also. Alicia left school to pursue a lucrative acting career…

To be continued…

 

Dignity and Debility and How to be Practically Perfect in Every Way…

"Is Venus my best feature? Or my worst?"

Any study or discipline which requires the consideration of a vast array of variables is bound to suffer from encroaching inelegance, and astrology suffers from this more than most disciplines; in the world of accepted science, perhaps meteorology is the closest facsimile that we can find for this situation. An astrologer, as much as the meteorologist is charged with the dire business of prediction, given faint praise when the outlook is mostly compatible with their prophecy, and damned into insignificance when they get it wrong, and when you consider that the spectrum of possible outcomes for weather are confined to a fairly narrow set of possibilities, precipitation, barometric pressure, humidity and temperature (thus wet or dry, windy or calm, hot or cold?) then the bleating denouncements of the “scientifically minded” begin to appear wholly ridiculous (which they are). Just because meteorology is often inexact nobody claims that we do not have weather. We understand though, and this crucially, that accurate measurement does not guarantee accurate insight, but it nevertheless maximises the potential for accuracy.

In my view, the main gift of astrological experience is what might be termed (in other industries) a soft-skill. It is a refined faculty of judgment which allows the expert to gauge what most matters in an individual astrology. In this sense, measurement is not about determining absolutes, but rather about determining priorities. In a system where there are a thousand variables, and each single one of these is itself subject to attenuation and moderation by other factors, well, it is simply not possible to make an exactitude. Vast networks of processors in subzero subterranean vaults grapple daily with the 6 intrinsic variables of weather and get it wrong. We are not, as astrologers, guilty of being unscientific, but those who claim as much are themselves; hypocrites by projection.

The ancients understood this much at least, although they did not have to face down such a vociferously narrow defile of consensus. For this purpose they made the system of essential dignities and debilities, and I have talked at some length about these important principles in recent weeks, but my most keen intention has been to espouse the understanding that we cannot measure an organic system with absolutes. The application of measurement is designed to assist us with gaining a generalised classification of typology within the nativity. When we look to essential dignity, we are given a numerical cue, one which suggests a certain intrinsic power or ease of expression of that particular point in the nativity. Traditional astrologers set great store by the system – and rightly so; it is useful – but they often overvalue its insights, most especially in light of the evolution of understandings that the ensuing centuries of work by incisively minded researchers and observers have gifted us.

The system of essential dignity is absolutely important, and there is also of course a broad system of accidental dignity scoring which can further refine and isolate priorities. Rather than exhaustively work through the system’s merits, I will today work through an example which will hopefully give us a three-tiered system of assessing priorities through measurement.

Fundamentally, we will use the following approach:

1) Scoring for essential dignity.
2) Scoring for accidental dignity.
3) Moderating priorities according to my own understanding of ease of expression.

Before we begin, and as far as I am aware, it is important to understand that your astrology software will happily spit out a score for essential dignity for any nativity you throw at it; but nothing will give you an accidental dignity score, and it will certainly not moderate those scores according to other, less deterministic factors. The irony of this is that the first, essential dignity, score is quite possibly likely to be utterly misleading when cited without reference to the subsequent considerations. Furthermore, you should bear in mind that while the system might seem initially complex, with time and experience you can quite happily make these calculations ‘on the hoof’ to a perfectly acceptable degree of exactitude.

Today I would like to use the example of Julie Andrews, because, as you will hopefully see, she makes an excellent test case. I am also rather intrigued by her in general  , not because I have any repressed ambiguities (I’ve never watched the Sound of Music), but rather because my astrology is uncannily similar to hers: indeed, Alice very often refers to me as ‘Hairy Poppins’. And it’s not funny, so no laughing. FYI, Julie and I share:

• Sun in Libra in the 1st.
• Moon in Scorpio in the 2nd and within a minute of mine.
• Mercury in Scorpio in the 2nd.
• Venus in Virgo in the 12th.
• Mars in Sagittarius in the 3rd.
• Our Ascendants within 4 degrees of each other
• Saturn Rx.
• A closest aspect of Sun ssq Jupiter.

Which, as I am sure you’ll appreciate is nothing short of uncanny. Here then is her astrology.

Julie Andrews: 1 Oct 1935 06:00 (BST -1:00) Walton on Thames, England

Typically then we might look at her astrology and our software will tell us that her essential dignity scores are as follows:

• Sun: -3
• Moon: 0
• Mercury: -5
• Venus: -9
• Mars: +5
• Jupiter: +5
• Saturn: +1

According to essential dignity scoring then, Venus is the standout with Mercury being also weak, and Mars and Jupiter moderately strengthened. How does this scoring tally with our understanding of Julie Andrews’ life and success? This is important to understand because dignity scoring gives us an insight – according to traditionalists – into our potential for success. For my own part, I believe that this is somewhat simplistic, my own view I explained and explored in much greater detail in my article on Dignity and Debility and the Fine Art of Furniture Making.

Ironic then that at this juncture, Julie’s Venus score is really rather bad, especially when you consider that it was undoubtedly her Venusian qualities which led her to fame (consider a 4 octave voice, alleged perfect pitch and her very perfectly Virgoan appearance and demeanour).

If we consider Venus in more detail then she is (traditionally) peregrine, which scores -5. This should not be confused with peregrine through lack of aspect, but it is part of the same paradigm; traditionally, peregrine is used to denote a body with no essential dignity. It becomes peregrine therefore because it cannot easily express its quality. The key insight then is that without aspect a body has less media through which to project itself; it is a further debility (and I really cannot begin to emphasise just how important this is).

So, peregrination is just a sense of absolute and outright debility. Consider Forrest Gump. The child with calipers develops such strength in his legs that he eventually is able to outrun anyone and everyone! That’s peregrination! That’s the exalting power of debility!

Now, if we consider also that Venus here is in the sign of her fall (another -4 then), she really has so little support that she is in all sorts of distress. Let us consider the second stage of measurement; that of accidental dignity/debility.

• 12th House: -5
• Direct: +4
• Slow: -2
• Oriental: -2
• Not combust or under beams: +5
• Opp. Saturn*: -2
• Sq. Mars*: -1

(* the ancients considered only partile hard aspects to the malefics to affect scoring but there is an easily observable attenuation at work in these cases and I always allow for any contact up to 4 degrees of partile and subtract a point per degree accordingly).

These factors give Julie’s Venus a score at stage 2 of our process of -12. If we apply this same methodology to the remainder of her nativity, then we have a cumulative essential and accidental dignity score set of:

• Sun: 0
• Moon: +8
• Mercury: +7
• Venus: -12
• Mars: +15
• Jupiter: +15
• Saturn: -3

The picture already becomes considerably more compelling. The debility of Venus is now seriously challenged by the power of Mars and Jupiter. Now we need to consider some of the soft factors, most of which are either commonly understood by modern astrologers, or are the result of my own experience over many years of consideration.

One of the most glaring differences (and hence difficulties) between traditional and modern astrology is that the former does not particularly acknowledge the influence of the outer planets (Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Chiron). These undoubtedly influence the personal planets however, but not in a way that is easy to account for. In broad terms the reality is compelling: whenever a personal planet is contacted by an outer, it is required to assimilate a measure of impersonal energy; that is to say that it can no longer be satisfied with personal, earthly or straightforward fixes; it must incorporate an element of the divine (even in easy aspect). To ignore this reality is patently ludicrous, but even aside from these, there are other factors which moderate these ’scores’.

Sun first then. He has no hard major contacts, but is in semisquare to Jupiter and this at only 4 minutes of arc is the closest aspect in the chart. This moderates by -2 in my view, simply because the aspect is so very tight and innate. Otherwise Sun is unaffected.

Moon is more intriguing. Traditional scoring will not account for a mutual reception with Pluto (a feature for this generation with Moon in Scorpio, consider also Elizabeth Taylor) and this lends enormous emotional power and a truly magnetic feminine. This accounts for a further +5 (certainly it cancels out the fallen position of Moon here). We also find the halfsum Mo=Sa/Pl, which is difficult enough to merit a further -2. Pallas is in utterly partile sextile with Moon also: this cannot be underestimated (and undoubtedly accounts for her typically fresh, near-boyish haircuts) and this ought to cancel out the previous halfsum consideration.

Mercury has to be an intriguing consideration, but consider that he rules the Ascendant (thus the self-expression, and most especially the voice) and there has to be a story here. First, he is squared to his modern ruler, which lends tension and power to his expressions but perhaps ought to be considered a debilitating factor, I make no modification however, because of the mutual reception with Moon and Pluto, which means that (by MR) Mercury is ruled by Pluto in his sign and can be seen by him: rather like a courtier who is in the king’s sight, he might struggle under the scrutiny but he will not vanish into obscurity. As an intriguing aside, Mercury is here closely conjunct Eurydice, muse of Orpheus, who had such a sweet voice that it made the Gods weep! Inevitably there is a great deal of power available to Mercury in this condition. Most importantly, Mercury began with an essential dignity score of -5 and this was vastly improved to +7 by inclusion of accidental dignities!

Venus we have already covered in some detail, and there is a difficult consideration to be found in this placing within the scoring system. The 12th house is never very comfortable for earthly matters, but we have to take this factor on board with a very careful understanding of the Zeitgeist which cannot remotely support the same motivations and insights today as they did in the time of Ptolemy. Global superstardom was never a particular option for the ancients (excepting perhaps an Alexander or a Caesar), so it would have been exceptionally difficult to incorporate a Neptunian impetus and still be ‘materially’ successful in days of old. A spiritual, artistic or shamanic role might have sufficed but it is a different measure of ’success’ that we need to consider in that context. Nowadays, Neptune rules cinema (for example), and so Venus in the 12th does find an outlet that capitalises – at least potentially – on the normally materially dissolving propensities of the Sea-King. The 12th house is also the house of Venus’ exaltation, so we might moderate favourably the ancient rule in this light. On the other hand, Venus is beset by difficulty through her being configured in an intriguing tee-square to Mars. A Venus-Mars square alone ought to be something of a disaster in any case since it is especially distressing for her best expression. This though has been accounted for somewhat through the ancient conditions and so I shall not modify it further.

Mars is rescued by his mutual reception with Jupiter and a number of accidentally dignifying factors but this cannot detract from his otherwise profoundly uncomfortable placement. As the focus of a very difficult tee-square being powered by a lack of parental love and affection (in the form of Venus-Saturn) all of that angst is released through energetic communication: Mars in Sagittarius is a lover of fresh air and horseplay and in the third, communication is key; one is forcibly reminded of someone twirling energetically through the fields and singing rather unreservedly…

Mars is also squared to Neptune and this is invariably a difficult energy, and I would subtract a point or two for this alone, the two forces are so utterly antagonistic that it cannot be easily assuaged and reconciled. Note too that this aspect more than any other is sexually ambiguous and creates a very tricky gender and sexual orientation confusion or bias. I find this especially intriguing in light of the fact that Julie Andrews is such a celebrated gay icon. Neptune is in his house as well remember.

Jupiter is intriguing because the only major aspect he makes within a tight orb is to Pluto, he is almost for this reason aspectually peregrine, I rarely find that Pluto is a happy medium through which to incorporate an energy, so too with any of the outer planets, but especially so with Hades. The semisquare to Sun also lessens his impetus and this ought to be a minor consideration.

Saturn is for the most part correct in my view, although a retrograde Saturn is usually among the most compelling of retrogradations and this cannot be underestimated.

Thus, the story is complete. I would set the final scores thus:

• Sun: -2
• Moon: +13
• Mercury: +7
• Venus: -10
• Mars: +10
• Jupiter: +12
• Saturn: -4

So, when all is said and done: how account for her great and iconic success; after all, at one time, Julie Andrews could lay claim to being the lead in the longest running Broadway musical of all time, the highest grossing Hollywood movie of all time and the biggest selling album of all time.

I believe that the timing is interesting, with Mary Poppins being released in 1963 and The Sound of Music in 1964, and these being the primary motivating productions for her subsequent stardom, I see that Venus by Solar Arc Direction transits the Saturn – Uranus midpoint by opposition on December 16th 1963; but more incisive even than this is that this midpoint placed Venus in quincunx to Sa/Ur, effectively forming a Yod by Solar Arc to Venus at 4° Libra, thus rising in the first in her domicile. This would be an incredible drive and impetus to express her difficult and profoundly debilitated Venusian quality.

But, when all is said and done, what do we learn through our scoring? It is not the strongest planets which have determined her path in life although inevitably they have assisted and supported, but rather the weakest, Venus, which has been the prime mover of her life.

It is ever the way, peregrination, debility, struggle, these are the restraints which temper and forge the soul and ultimately exalt and emancipate, if they do not grind to nothingness in the attempt. Within our greatest weaknesses lie our most staggering potentials.

 

New Journal

Just a quiet mention for the advent of my new journal site dedicated to recording the wholly unesoteric sum of my views on real life, at least some of which does not involve astrology. Okay, so that’s a slight misrepresentation I know, life really  is astrology, but it helps to get out there and do something mundane once in a while.

Our Great Outdoors is a serialised ramble about rambling and other outdoor pursuits, I am soon to embark on a hundred mile walk with Alice down the spine of Northern England, from Hadrian’s Wall to the Yorkshire Dales and we’ll be writing that up, as well as our other various misadventures in the same vein.

Please visit and say hello if you get a chance.

 

An Accident of Birth?

I am by no means a traditionalist when it comes to the study of astrology, but by the same token neither am I so much of a modernist that I am happy to discard much of the ancient wisdom either. In truth my only genuine difficulty with traditional astrology is its fixed bias, but I don’t want to get stuck on the debate of ancient vs. modern. My own view is clearly delineated in between the lines of almost every article I write and I am happy to use traditional techniques where they are an aid to measurement, and the scoring of essential dignity is undoubtedly of great benefit in gauging the relative ease or difficulty of any given placement in the nativity.

I have already made a foray into the value of essential dignity in my previous article: Dignity and debility and the fine art of furniture making. In that discussion I make the case for my understanding that whilst essential dignity is a useful technique it is a measure of ease and not potential. Indeed, it is arguable that essential dignity retards potential in the sense that there is no requirement to work at any given mode of expression; craftsmanship is more likely to evolve in cases where there is essential debility than dignity.

One other problem with the system is that it does not account for the houses of the chart. We all know that Venus is at home in the 7th (and to some extent also the 2nd, at least in her monetary guise) and that she “joys in the 5th”, but such wisdom is not included in the measurement of essential dignity and what is unquestionable is that Venus is immensely helped in her expression when she is found in any of these houses. I would certainly be inclined to improve her scoring if she were to be found in the 7th, the 2nd or the 5th. When a planet is found within its natural house, we make note of such accidental dignity and account for it.

But that is accepted wisdom, and the understandings of astrology are fully concomitant with this insight, and yet they make no account of accidental exaltation. By this understanding, Venus ought to also be improved in the 12th house, and arguably, by a greater measure even than in the 7th.

Technically, in traditional lore, accidental dignity is not simply determined by the house position of a planet, it is more correctly determined to be made up by any helpful factor that is not essential. That means that Venus (as per our example) will always be dignified in her own sign (because it is of her essence), but she might be further and accidentally dignified by any number of other less obvious factors, one of the most recognisable of which is her house position. By the same token she might be accidentally dignified through good aspect (especially to a helpful influence, such as Jupiter), through being placed on the Midheaven (and thus exalted and directly sheltering the nativity) or any number of other factors: the ancients listed a great raft of conditions such as speed of travel, not being combust or under the beams, or configured to a beneficial star, but for the most part these methods become obscure to the point of impracticability, or certainly to the point of questionable relevance, due to a law of diminishing returns.

As an astrologer, the key gift of experience is to be able to make a swift consideration of any given planet’s dignity, not necessarily in this exhaustively technical manner, but at the very least by taking into account the strength or weakness of the major factors, which have to be, in a vague order of insistence, placement by sign, house, aspect (or lack thereof especially) and angularity; the last of which is always significant where it is found, (a principle understood as the Gauquelin sectors).

We all ought to understand the basic principles of essential dignity, but the principles of accidental dignity are only at best, vaguely understood within the literature. It ought to be very helpful to have Venus therefore in the sign of Libra, but if she is in the first house squared by Pluto and stationary, then any genuine benefit from her essential dignity would at best be severely curtailed by this level of accidental debility.

By the same token, the sign Aries is not the happiest of placements for harmony and relationship focused Venus, but she might be ably assisted and indeed ‘lifted up’ by other factors of accidental dignity, Perhaps she might be trined to Jupiter and in the 7th house, and these would certainly help to boost her powers and therefore her better qualities might be easier to express. This is absolutely the key insight too, because this score that we are attempting to grasp is only a crude measure of how comfortable the energy of that planet is to express and it is for this reason a means to apprehending an underlying princple; it is not the score itself that matters, but its raison d’etre.

So, Venus in the 7th is much improved because there is no easier place to express the Venusian quality than in a marriage. She ‘joys in the 5th’ because in romance she is allowed to show her best qualities too, and she is comfortable in the 2nd because money earned is her realm as well and all material things that assist in comfort, leisure and ease are her natural domain. By the same token, Venus in the 1st ought to be a considerable block in this most Martian of houses, her influence will be self-directed, so Venus here is more concerned with appearances than with marital harmony; it is a placement that encourages vanity at the expense of partnership.

I would moderate (albeit in an intuitve manner) the essential dignity scores according to all of these factors when considering a nativity. Essential dignity (as determined by sign will always be the first consideration, but it cannot be the only consideration. House position is key as well, and indeed every house has its sympathy with every planet and we ought to understand this. I would consider Venus to be strengthened in the 2nd, 5th, 7th and also the 12th; indeed, I would consider the 7th and 12th to be her strongest positions, because these are the houses of her rulership (Libra – 7th) and exaltation (Pisces – 12th). Each gives a markedly different form of expression, with the 7th representing personal love and the 12th universal love, but in either house, Venus will be considerably more able to express her quality than in the selfish 1st and the workaday 6th. The former struggles to think of the other person and the latter struggles to feel romantic and neither bodes well even for an otherwise essentially dignified Venus.

I hope that the principle is clear enough. Here then is a table of correspondences with which I would modify the essential dignity scores (and please bear in mind this is an attempt to quantify what I would normally consider to be a rather immeasurable understanding, so do not take it too literally, we are concerned with the principles that are posited by the rules, not the other way around!)

	Rule.	Exaltation	Joy	Gloom?	Fall	Det.
Sun	5	1	9	3	7	11
Moon	4	2	3	9	8	10
Mercury	3	6	1	7	12	9
Venus	7	12	5	11	6	1
Mars	1	10	6	12	4	7
Jupiter	9	4	11	5	10	3
Saturn	10	7	12	6	1	4
Uranus	11	8	–	–	2	5
Neptune	12	4	–	–	10	6
Pluto	8	–	–	–	–	2

Of course there are various provisos to all of these various positionings but as a general rule I would modify the essential dignities by 3 or 4 points either way for accidental dignity or debility according to house position. I would be prepared to modify those factors according to the more general conditions of a nativity, but the fundamental message that this entire apprehension of placement is intended to convey is that scoring is designed to facilitate a correct feeling for any given placement, but more importantly how that fits into the whole. It is simply not good enough to say that an essential dignity score of (say) -9 is a recipe for disaster without considering the various other factors that are in play: of these house position is very nearly as important as sign; it is all very well being able to sing like an angel, but if the only place you are able to sing is in the bath then it is not going to affect your destiny to any great extent.

Next time around I will be considering an example where these principles are thrown into very sharp relief.