The hard aspects in an astrology chart – oppositions, squares, and certain conjunctions, depending on the planets involved – often describe the inner arguments inside of us, the emotional knots we keep tugging at even when experience has repeatedly demonstrated...
The square aspect in astrology describes a condition of inner friction. It won’t allow a person to remain comfortably asleep inside themselves. It brings together forces that don’t naturally understand one another. Unlike the opposition, where tension is often projected...
Psychological astrology begins with a rather loaded idea: you didn’t arrive here as a tiny spiritual being waiting to be imprinted by whoever happened to be holding the bottle. You came in already with certain expectations, sensitivities, images, hungers, and...
In Liz Greene’s The Dark of the Soul, which mostly discusses psychopaths, there is a section about the low boredom threshold being part of the psychopath’s psychology. This refers to someone needing constant stimulation. It can reflect a need to...
Occultists like Vera Stanley Alder teach that the stars and planets are living beings evolved to an extent we cannot conceive of. In astrology, we often like to think of the planets as teachers in the great university of the...
One of the most revealing things astrology can do is hold up a mirror to the weird little ways we trip over our own feet and then act shocked there was a floor. Self-sabotage is rarely dramatic at first. It...
A cardinal cross on the chart points to being pulled in different directions. One part wants independence (1st/Aries), another wants safety (4th/Cancer). One part wants to relate (7th/Libra), another wants to go out into the outer world (10th/Capricorn). The cardinal...
I have made myself a little tarot set. I am not really drawn to tarot in the standard way, with traditional meanings. I tried the conventional version years ago and, by my own admission, I wasn’t exactly good at it. Continue reading My Tarot Cards: The Sensitive Witch Enters Wrong Door
Astrology is often most illuminating when it wanders into the territory of psychology, because this is where symbols start becoming uncomfortably, beautifully human. What it reveals is the contradictions we all carry, the desires disowned, the wounds defended, and the...
It has took a long time to separate astrology from the idea it requires psychic powers. Astrology can be approached as a symbolic language, a map of patterns, a contemplative art, a way of understanding cycles, temperament, development, and the...
In astrology, the planets are universal, but there are only so many of them, which at first sounds like a terrible system for explaining eight billion complicated people. The raw materials are limited, but the combinations are not. This is...
Karen Horney believed that, while a therapist could certainly help untangle the psychic complexes, one could, with sufficient honesty, do a bit of untangling oneself. Not as swift, perhaps. Not as tidy. But real. The natal chart is a symbolic...