Reading the Cosmic Clock

Some foundations of astrological house theory

Not all that long ago, if you wanted to look at an astrological chart, you had to calculate it and draw it first, by hand. You needed a book of houses and quite a bit of knowledge just to get started. We are currently receiving readings from the first generation of astrologers who don’t have to know anything about that. These days anyone can input a date, time, and place into an astrological chart-making software or app — Chani Nicholas’ website or app, astro.com, Time Nomad, and many others — and produce a natal chart, along with transits for the current date or any other date. This easiness has to account for some of the explosion of interest in astrology in the last decade. The old barriers to entry have been significantly lowered. But it also means that many of us are accessing charts without any foundational understanding of how to read them. Or possibly we’ve never seen our own charts at all.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Systems of symbols are complex by nature; they aren’t necessarily meant to be easily learned or understood. And as with any cosmology or system of symbols, there are gradations of meaning in astrology. You can get a lot of out of just studying the archetypes of the Zodiac and knowing people’s birthdays and sun signs. You can get a lot out of just tracking the seasons and the phases of the moon. More information or more complexity does not automatically create more value. For me, though, things started getting really interesting once I learned the basics of the astrological language and chart reading. Probably 11 years ago now, I got a copy of Demetra George’s Astrology and the Authentic Self: Integrating Traditional and Modern Astrology to Uncover the Essence of the Birth Chart, and swallowed it whole. I opened a free account at astro.com, looked up my chart, my lover’s chart, and my sister’s chart. I started having breakthroughs in understanding. I was hooked.

There’s just something about seeing the big picture of where everything in the heavens was at the moment you were born, this holy wheel of fortune in the sky. It’s like each of us a personal mandala composed by planets and stars. And rather than needing to go see someone else for a reading of that mysterious mandala, I found that once I knew the basic game, I could study on my own, focusing on certain aspects, going at my own pace. And that slowing down itself allowed for a richness of transmission. It took my love of the moon and my commitment to noticing it to a whole other devotional level. Planet by planet, aspect by aspect, transit by transit, a reflection my own nature and wholeness flowered before me. Or rather, it flowers; it’s flowering.

It also gave me a way to study one of the most substantial obstacles standing between all of us and our dreams of making and becoming — timing. I believe each of us has unique gifts to give, important offerings to make to the world. But for that to happen, those gifts have to be cultivated, and sometimes receptivity to our gifts has to be cultivated. Like life is garden with the potential for all this flowering and fruiting, but only if we master its tending. By studying the times and tides of the turnings of the earth and the others planets, we can learn when to plant and when to reap. By then tracking how our own actions and the larger forces together produce a certain yield, along with persistent study of our own internal being, what we even want to grow and why, we figure out how to better direct our intentions—our focused, timely, relevant attention and actions—toward achieving the result we desire. It is all mostly very humbling—like, I am not a master gardener yet. If I am impatient and try to harvest prematurely, or if I try increase my yield beyond what conditions can bear, or if I waste energy complaining about the conditions, all of which I do, I fail to achieve what I want. But I often succeed in gaining patience, appreciation, and more wisdom to guide the next round of efforts.

Astrology is clearly not for everyone, and many people who dismiss astrology are accurately perceiving the potential dangers of taking its symbols literally. But they are also completely missing the rewards of taking them symbolically—of entering into relationship with living symbols, those capable of bringing us into our totality, teaching us right timing and right relationship, and helping us cultivate our gifts. I’m guessing if you’re reading this newsletter, you are not, in fact, missing the potential rewards. You’ve already hosted a few rebellions against literalism, embraced animism and practical magic, smoked a few dreams in the Jung pipe just to see what it’s like. You also may already be familiar with the system of astrological symbols, and in no need of a primer—and if that’s the case, thank you for patience with all this, and only read on if you like a little preaching to the choir.

Some of you haven’t yet learned to read your own birth chart, and would like to, and for you I am kicking off this series of Moon School posts and mini-courses with some astrology primers. It also just feels right to begin by honoring the system of symbols that brings us together every new and full moon. The major components of the astrological language are planets, signs, houses, and aspects. I want to get into the houses first, how their meanings are entangled with the the meanings of the zodiac signs, and how together the 12 houses and signs map the cycle of natural growth—the real and metaphorical garden—and the cycle of human development. I hope this demystifies some aspects of what I’m doing, and what astrologers and astrology lovers in general are doing. And then we can get on with being properly mystified.