Samain Stent Moon
Astrology is a thicket of wild claims, unjustified certainty, and intriguing utility. Sorta like religion. In my reading so far I’ve found sensible, modest intellectuals who lean on the utility, using this ancient discipline (Mesopotamian in origin.) to promote self-knowledge. I’ve also found, as you might expect, a number of at least charlatanesque figures who are only one step away from the traveling potion wagons of the early frontier. OK, maybe not one step away.
Learning how to read a natal chart is the base line of astrology and I’m working on how to do it for myself. It’s not easy. Many symbols to learn, planets, houses, signs, aspects. Also, for understanding it in a way that makes sense to me, I’m still pursuing the nature of archetypes. That requires a lot of refreshing from my Jungian salad days. Still not sure it will be worth it in the end, but I’m committed to giving it a fair look. I had a similar fascination for a time with psychometrics like the MMPI, the Big Five, Meyers-Briggs, Eneagram, and career choosing tests. Fiddling with the dials of the self, trying to tune in, see inside. All part of the journey of self-discovery. I’ve learned something from each of them, but I found the psychometric approach judgemental in its attempt to sort the normal from the abnormal.
The evolutionary and psychological astrologists have the most potential for utility and explicitly eschew judgement. In the older, predictive style of astrology, still common, there are, for example, malefic and benefic planets, aspects, even charts. Malefic = bad and benefic = good. Mars and Saturn, malefic. Jupiter and Venus, benefic, for example. These two schools see instead psychic forces, archetypal influences that can create, say, energy for transformation in the case of Mars and Saturn. Or, misapplied, the beneficial aspects Jupiter and Venus can impede personal growth.
In the later days of my interest in psychometrics there was a similar change from seeing certain personality characteristics as bad or good, especially those characterized as abnormal. Two instances from my own testing. I spiked both the 4 and 5 scales* of the MMPI when tested in the mid-1970’s in seminary. In the original uses of the MMPI these two scales supposedly determined whether you were a psychopath, 4, or a homosexual, 5. The new (then) understanding became: 4 spike = non-conforming, rebellious, angry, creative, family problems, impulsive and 5 spike = lacks traditional masculine interests. This testing was also done while I was still drinking and some of those 4 scale attributes reinforced my addiction. Though I may have lacked masculine interests (not quite sure what that means), I did have one clear masculine interest. Women.
I suppose you could frame this like Tarnas frames the major problem of our time: an ensouled primal universe and a disenchanted enlightenment universe in conflict, needing, very much needing a synthesis. On my mind all the time these days. Imagining ways through this conflict, ways to reconcile, to use the tension as a creative force for a new metaphysics. Reimagining. Reconstructing. Reenchanting.
*Scale 4 (AKA the Psychopathic Deviate Scale) Measures a person’s need for control or their rebellion against control. Scale 5 (AKA the Femininity/Masculinity Scale) Measures a stereotype of a person and how they compare. For men it would be the Marlboro man, for women it would be June Cleaver or Donna Reed.
Wonder what the stars (and the planets) have to say about reading my full chart for the first time today? We could look it up. I’m going to Golden, under Table Mesa, to the Bean Fosters coffee house. Elisa, a petroleum geologist, dean of academics at a consortium of community colleges and a member of Congregation Beth Evergreen has done whatever astrologists do with my birth information. She says the consult lasts as long as I have questions. She really doesn’t have that long, so I’ll restrain myself.
Bacon also points out that the path of facts and induction may be slow, but it heads in the right direction. No matter how fast you go down a path without facts, you will never reach the truth.
His emphasis on depth psychology, in particular synchronicity and the collective unconscious, as partial evidence that the modern Self need not be wholly isolate makes sense to me. I had many years of Jungian analysis and find the non-pathological approach of Jungian thought very congenial. I’m not sure how many outside the world of depth psychology would agree with him on this point however. But, I do.
Neither an obvious nor an easy matter. “I’m going to have my chart read this afternoon.” “I know.” “Yes, you know, but you don’t approve.” “Oh, I think it’s fine to read your chart. But, believing it?” She shrugged. Kate and I share a strong or high version of the modern Self, reason uber alles. I have flirted, however, for a very long time with a Romantic view carrying an aesthetic and spiritual seeker’s heart inside a rationalist’s body and mind. This is not a synthesis. It’s a carrying of opposites, learning from both, knowing the parallel, never touching rails down which they run.
One more turn to Tarnas before my consultation with Elisa tomorrow. He made his move toward a synthesis of the modern mind and the Romantic–equivalent to the distinction between the self shaped by the Copernican disenchanted cosmos and the primal, ensouled (enchanted) universe that went before. His initial step came through depth psychology, tapping the collective unconscious and the idea of synchronicity to suggest a permeable self influenced by the cosmos and influencing it. Having opened the door between Self and cosmos with depth psychology, he turned toward astrology.
His argument about skepticism as a tool, not an end, was a wakin’ up moment for me. Oh, duh! Of course. Only I hadn’t seen it that way. Skepticism was a way of life for me and I treated the world of ideas as you might expect. I embraced almost nothing, held every philosophical and religious claim at a skeptical arms length. Yes. And no. I had let the tool use me, rather me using the tool.
My only point here is that astrology, especially one linked as Tarnas does to the concept of archetypes, may provide us with aids to self-knowledge, aids that light up an enchanted universe, help it become visible. And if it does, I want to use it, include it in my tool kit. Right there alongside skepticism. But I don’t see it as the only, or even the most important, clue to an ensouled universe.
Though I haven’t begun to read them yet, William Vollman’s two volume work: No Immediate Danger and No Good Alternative, the Carbon Ideologies paints a bleak picture. So does the 
If we cannot slow down the rate of climate change (which is the most we can do, since so much climate change is already baked in), then we move to mitigation and adaptation. Geoengineering will become a buzz word as various strategies are tried. Climate refugees will become more and more disruptive across the world, especially those moving from coastal areas into interiors and onto higher ground. The already underway shifts in plant and animal eco-systems, climate refugees all, will bring them with different disease vectors, disruption to agriculture and sea life.
We will not be known for Vietnam, civil rights, feminism, ruining health care, electing fascists to high office, but as the generation that allowed an earth compatible with human populations to slip away. Hard as it is to imagine the results of this inaction will be far, far more damaging than all the wars, holocausts and pogroms. How will we explain this to our grandchildren, to Ruth and Gabe in our instance? I understand the political and economic forces that have gotten us here, but explaining them will not alter the misery.
Meanwhile in the Trump dimension: “
Yale Environment 360 elaborates
Mentioned 
In addition to cooking, the sumi-e (ink brush painting), and working out, I mentioned the possibility of a greenhouse. Expensive, so we’ll see about that. But. I began reading a book I’ve had for a while, 
Buddy Bill Schmidt will recognize the quote that begins the chapter on Soil: “See what you’re looking at.” Carey Reams, an unlikely looking radical, used to say this. He was the founder of the outfit from which I purchase soil additives, the High Brix Gardening folks in Farmington, Minnesota. He contended, as do many now in the farm-to-table world, that agriculture went astray long ago, moving toward products that fit mechanized food production rather than human nutrition.
The vast wheat fields of the Great Plains grow an annual wheat, two varieties that work well in steel rolling mills. Not only have these annual crops destroyed the ten feet or more of top soil that buffalo and deeply rooted grasses developed there, but the steel mills which make this crop profitable separate the germ and bran from the kernel, leaving only fluffy white flour. What’s bad about that? Well, turns out the nutrition in wheat lies in the germ and the bran.
I guess this is the native Midwesterner in me. I grew up driving past corn fields, pastures filled with Holsteins and Guernseys, pigs and beef cattle. The Andover gardens, the orchard and the bees, along with our small woods satisfied this part of my soul. I’m going to investigate local CSA’s, see if that’s a route back into this world. We have to buy groceries anyway, so why not from folks who share a philosophical position close to my own.