Astrology means, “study of the stars or cosmos.” It includes the extra definition of how the stars, planets and luminaries influence our lives here on Earth. In Western Astrology, this is mostly confined to the planets of our solar system as well as the Sun and our Moon, called Luminaries, or light-emitting bodies.
The astrological zodiac is comprised of the twelve animal signs that most people are familiar with. These are the signs that begin with Aries at the vernal equinox, marking the beginning of the season of spring, and ending with the sign of Pisces, indicating the last month of winter. The zodiac is the stage of all the action in Astrology. The planets of our solar system reside in one of these signs at all times relative to our position on earth. The planets are also have a relationship to each other according to the nature of the sign they are inhabiting at any given time. These relationships to us and to each other form much of the basis of astrological measurement.
There are 360 degrees geometrically in a circle. These are degrees of arc or increments of spherical curvature. The objects are all more or less round or spherical in the solar system and they rotate about the sun in a circular motion called orbiting and revolve on their own axes in a motion called rotation.
These motions are important to Astrology. If there was no movement then there would be no point in studying a birth chart because the charts would all be the same. Here we come to another important defining factor in Astrology, the study of the differences between things. It is the differences that are important. If we were all the same then we would probably have no need of Astrology or Psychology or Chemistry. If nothing ever changed then we would probably not be aware of our existence as separate entities and there would be no death, transformation, and existential anxiety. There would also be no potential for growth either.
No one knows or is at least able to prove in scientific materialist terms how Astrology works, that is, mechanically, electromagnetically, gravitationally, etc. According to all known scientifically acknowledged forces, Astrology shouldn’t work. Oftentimes, scientists will say that the doctor in the delivery room will have more gravitational effect on a new born baby than the moon, and the moon is relatively close by astronomical distances and has the most gravitational effect on the Earth of all the bodies in our solar system.
Most Astrologers are not scientists and thus don’t limit themselves to using disciplines that only work according to known physical forces. However, Astrology has a basis in material fact. The planets, Sun, Moon and stars all exist physically, whereas, in the art of Tarot card reading, for example, there are no physical entities where information is derived from. This is not to dismiss this practice but to explain why the scientific community in general has such a bone to pick with Astrology in particular. Most Astronomers don’t want to have Astrology confused with Astronomy and they get very miffed when there is any confusion about the obvious overlap between the disciplines.
Astronomers study the motions of the Heavens too. The main difference is that they do not attribute any meaning or significance to these motions. They are materialists and empiricists and trust only the evidence of their senses or the data that their instruments can measure.
To be fair, they do follow a method and are very rigorous about not transgressing it most of the time.
Astronomy and Astrology used to be the same discipline. It is only since relatively modern times that they have grown apart. With the advent of the Scientific Materialist Paradigm, which was born around the time Galileo discovered that the Earth was not the center of the universe, men such as Isaac Newton began to develop accurate and precise methods of mapping reality by inventing Calculus and the discovery of the first laws of physics. In the wake of this scientists realized that they could do all these nifty things that didn’t rely on magic and superstitious mumbo jumbo. Science grew powerful, and along with it a particular temperament grew powerful. In the wake of all the material progress that has followed in the last few hundred years the world has been bedazzled ever since. These scientific temperaments attempted to debunk Astrology, and mystical practices in general, seeing Astrology as a quaint relic of a bygone era at best and as a dangerous and chaotic way of thinking at worst.
In Jungian terms, we could say it was the ascendancy of the Thinking and Sensation functions over their opposites Feeling and Intuition.
However, since the birth of quantum mechanics some scientists have realized that when you get down to the nitty-gritty of the material world it essentially proves to be incalculable and strange, behaving in ways that defy neat theories that the physicists had been so grand at coming up with in the 20th century.
Astrology and Astronomy used to be the same thing. People used to gaze at the heavens and notice movements of the Sun, Moon, and the stars and wondered what the significance was for them or their communities. It is a natural human desire to wonder what that great unknown harbors. The heavens are a visual portrait of that unknown. We can see it yet we can’t. Not completely.
In Human Terms
We as human beings have in common that we were all born at particular time and location. This distinguishes us from The Eternal and The Infinite. There are cycles that every human goes through at particular stages of their existence, a time to be a child, a time to learn to speak, a time to fall in love, a time to get our first job, a time to move away from home, a time to start our own families, a time to experience the death of loved ones.
A birth chart is a picture of where the heavens stopped on the day you were born. Since the heavens never stop this is quite special. This is our inheritance, our piece of the infinite, and literally our birth right, stronger than all other pedigrees or lineages. Astrological influence is stronger than the biological family we were born into, stronger than any of the bonds made while here on Earth.
Our Astrology is the strongest imprint we will receive while in this life. It is the power of the first moment. Along with the stellar conditions at our birth, our innate temperament and the name we were given are the two most powerful influences in this life. If we can decipher these we will be as close to god’s, or our own higher self’s, intent as we can get in rational terms. These are truly cosmic in nature. It is very powerful to connect with this heritage because it kind of overrides all other endowments. If we can understand our birth right then we will be in possession of the Key to Destiny. It is as they say, “written in the stars.”
Astrology is not primarily practical, though it can be. Astrology is something to be lived up to rather than the other way around. It speaks in a symbolic, mythological language that if ascended and grown toward, like a plant to the sun, facilitates in one’s growth. The art of astrology is to be able to see everything as a whole. This can only come through the faculty of Intuition, the very faculty which the practitioners of the Scientific Materialist Paradigm can’t explain through their laws and methods.
note to self: if you reason by intuition, the result is delusion by definition, regardless of how plausible it may be
I never said anything about reasoning by intuition. Intuition is an irrational process that arrives at a truth or fact independent of the reasoning process. You are using the phrase “by definition” wrong. Nowhere is it implicit in the definition of “intuition” that it is delusive in nature. No dictionary that I have seen defines “intuition” in this way. A lot of scientific materialists define it this way. Yes, I would agree with that.
the problem is with notion of ‘intuition’. it’s etymologically charged with the meaning that it gained from the Romantic period onward, as a counter-weight to ‘reason’ or ‘rationality’.
thing is, the western rationalist tradition, from Descartes onward, tended to equate rationality with that part of the human mind that could be followed by consciousness and conveyed through universally recognized formulas (logic, in short). however, we now know that this is just a very small fragment of the brain’s capacity to produce valuable information.
the thinkers who opposed this kind of reductionist rationalism always knew that (since they were mostly intuitive types), but tended to make the mistake of arguing in terms of irrational vs the rational. in reality, these are just names given by our tradition to our experience of certain cognitive phenomena.
now we know that ‘intuition’ (the type of syntheses processed unconsciously by the right cerebral hemisphere and delivered as ready-made conclusion to the consciousness) is just as a useful cognitive operation as left-brain dominated consequential reasoning. it’s actually formidable, because it’s quicker, able to assemble a much wider range of information in a shorter time, and it can actually more accurate (just check out experiments made on people with brain damage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82tlVcq6E7A min 5:50-6:10 is fascinating: right brain ‘intuition’, that is the cognitive process that takes place outside the control of verbally accessible consciousness, knows the right answer, then left-brained ‘logic’ comes in and tries to bring up a ‘logical’ explanation for the right hemisphere’s correct answer – and it makes sense, but it’s just plain wrong :))
in short, there’s nothing irrational in intuition. it’s a formidable cognitive function … it just happens to be largely outside of left-brain controlled consciousness, so we can’t properly explain how we got there. which is a problem, yes – but only for those who have a weaker intuition. once cognitive science will progress, intuitive types will get their revenge on logical ones … who will be replaced by computers anyway. sorry guys, you had your 400 years of fame, it’s over, I’m afraid
here, a good insight in the left-right brain theory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFs9WO2B8uI
of course, this is a different paradigm from MBTI, but you can clearly see where they intersect
Yes, it is clear that the Jungian functions each have their localized areas in the brain. The external judging functions are probaly front brain functions with Te being the front-left brain and Fe being the front-right brain. Te would definitely correspond to executive functioning in the brain; the ability to plan and carry-out tasks linearly and working memory perhaps.
I see intuition as a back brain function and I think I have noticed that many intuitives have pronounced and protruding upper back skull areas. May be an aid to identification, I don’t know.
It is clear that extraverted perception is a very right-brained activity. So, yeah, that is some of the stuff I have noticed. Lenore Thomson discusses some of this in relation to the Jungian functions. Very interesting stuff, no doubt.
thanks for the reference! she seems very good
Yes, I agree with everything you said. The death bell is tolling for the reductive rationalists. They have basically replaced themselves with computers. So, so long and thanks for all the fish.
I am sorry to burst your bubble! 🙂 This is not only a great blog but a lot of research and your personal interest must have been invested in it. But you know what astrology is bullshit! and you cannot under any circumstance predict what the next moment will be for you or how you react either. And about jungian type , a guy randomly created some types to explain human behaviour and YOU believe him? Dude ! I thought you were more intelligent than this, you cannot typify people in 16 types .Every person is unique and beautiful .who never was or will ever be existing afterwards. Look I respect your viewpoint and blog and don’t even think I am critisizing you ,I am just saying stop judging and start realising we all humans and basically the same . Your destiny is determined by your actions now and by the character you are building for yourselves…
If you want to have any hopes of bursting my bubble then you are going to have to be able to string two thoughts together without contradicting yourself. How can people be unique while being basically the same?
What I meant was people are basically the same as in there is no diversion of extroversion or introversion etc. We are who we choose to be and maybe social conditioning & gene factors are involved but to very less degree and so all the factors contribute towards making us an unique individual. But the point is you are trying to contradict me instead of finding reasons for why both astrology & jungian archetypes totally cannot define a person..you are who you are because of the choices you make…Thank you.:-)
Look, I’m not trying to contradict you. I’m merely responding to what you said, which didn’t make sense to me.
As for responding to the comments about Jungian typology and astrology, based on your quick and inaccurate dismissal of both of them, I really have nothing to say because I don’t think your comments even merit response.
If you want to think astrology is bullshit, you are absolutely entitled to hold that opinion. However, you have certainly not even come close to debunking it. You are merely stating that no one can know what will happen in the next moment or in the future. You have given nothing besides your opinion to back that up.
When you wax incredulous about the level of my intelligence for giving credence to Jung’s system of typology, you do so without the slightest amount of indication that you understand that system or how it was arrived at. It certainly was not arrived at “randomly” as you maintain.
In short, you lack respect and open-mindedness. You have already made up your mind about what is correct and what is not. But, as far as convincing anyone of the rightness of your opinion and the incorrectness of astrology or Jungian type theory, you have failed, with me at least.
Also, it is not my place to convince you of the validity of these things. If you stated an opinion, then it is up to you to back it up. So far you have given me nothing to respond to. If you think astrology is bullshit because there is no way anyone could predict the future with it then that is your belief. I would ask how you know that with certainty, but I wouldn’t go off in a defense of astrology on this account.
Astrology can stand or fall on its own merits.
But, I will tell you something about astrology. For one thing, it has been around since before recorded history and for some reason it still flourishes in many different forms. Why? My belief is that it captures people’s imaginations as a symbol system. Another, is that astrology actually works for people that know how to use it properly.
The first criteria would be valid enough to me, similar to mythological archetypes that reoccur throughout human history. They capture people’s imaginations. That is enough for me to accord something some degree of validity or existence, the mere fact that it occupies the collective psyche.
Einstein, the scientist of scientists to many scientists, said that “imagination is more important than knowledge”, which should be enough for any rational empiricist to stop dead in their tracks to ponder that statement. Was Einstein dumb ? Imagination is more important than knowledge. Hmm.
But, even at the beginning of the rational-empirical-physical mindset lies the crowning figure of them all, Mr. Isaac Newton, the inventor of calculus and the discoverer of the first laws of physics. He studied astrology and alchemy and there is evidence to suggest that his scientific studies were of the least importance to him. He was more of a mystic perhaps. Jung was similar in this respect. But, he certainly wasn’t just some half-assed dude who randomly assigned psychological types to people. He was a very deep and responsible scholar who worked for many years observing patterns of behavior and temperament in his patients.
The point is the knowledge is out there for any diligent seeker of these things. You can come here and claim you are bursting my bubble but in reality you aren’t really saying anything that merits a response.
There is evidence for either side of this. Yes, genes and social conditioning are definitely responsible for forming a person’s personality to some extent. Not disagreeing with that.
I respect science but don’t limit myself to it’s strict method’s for what it will accept as true or not. In some contexts, science is immensely helpful. In others, materialistic science is a rather awkward and blind creature.
Why must astrology prove itself to science? Because we live in the age of the ascendancy of science? It is only for a short time in human history that science of the type we recognize in the Western world has reigned. There is evidence from the quarter of quantum physics that when you break things down far enough, you get the irrational. You lose certainties and only have probabilities. Astrology is much like that. I would say it is a science of patterns and probabilities.
As for Jungian type theory, the preference for introversion or extroversion is one of the more stable dichotomies. As a matter of common sense, it seems clear to my perception that people tend to orient more towards the objective or subjective. However, it is true that well-balanced people will learn to orient towards the direction that is less preferred and developed when necessary, and as a form of growth and self-development.
If you see people as being similar to snowflakes, which are never quite the same twice, then that tells me something about the way you are structured right there. In this system, it shows a lack of intuition and a corresponding strength in sensation. Sensors tend to see people as being one-off types never to be repeated again. Intuitives tend to see the similar patterns of behavior between the different people they meet.
It is very evident to me that people are not wholly unique and that they do share patterns and traits with other people. That being said, no one is exactly the same, but it seems rather foolish to suggest that everyone is absolutely unique. If that were true, then you would be right to say that there is no basis for type theory because each new person would be a new type.
The ironic thing is that if a person manages to be really different from everybody else, they are likely to be an intuitive type. Because they can see the similarities between people, they know what it takes to be different.
Using the snowflake analogy, a sensor would appreciate an individual snowflake for being unlike every other snowflake that has ever existed. An intuitive would appreciate it for the similarities it shares with every other snowflake so that they could form a conception of “the idea of snowflake.” In other words, intuitives are abstractors. They abstract the essence of an encountered phenomenon. Sensors take each thing as a unique phenomenon, which means they accept things as they are. They do not see “the idea of snowflake”, they see a particular snowflake.
Anyway, there is your response that I said that I wouldn’t give.
And thanks for your comment 🙂
so, I wouldn’t say intuition is “an irrational process that arrives at a truth or fact independent of the reasoning process”: it’s a cognitive process of rational analysis that takes place outside of consciousness (and thus much faster), and conveys ready-made results to the conscious mind. as such it indeed has certain shortcomings (we can’t double-check how it got there, and all the logical mistakes it might have made on the way … so, it’s neither universal nor certain … sorry Plato … and it’s certainly a good thing that we have to filter it through the universally accessible formulas of logical thinking … but it’s good to remember that logics doesn’t conform very well to the world, as quantum theory shows us so beautifully)
Yeah, sorry, I am using the term “irrational” to be in congruence with Jung. I don’t think intuition is an irrational process in the sense that reductive rationalists would.
Hi –
I’m a big fan of your writing — so clear. And you need to write faster! I’m left re-reading the comments, as I’ve already re-read all the articles.
I agree with your thought that introversion vs extraversion dichotomy is likely the most stable of Jung’s theory. To spin off that, I’ve always wondered if the thinking vs feeling dichotomy is the most unstable of the four. For example, I think healthy, mature people often land in the middle of that continuum, and can be thoughtful and deeply feeling, probably at the same time. If gut-level emotional hunches + thinking = intuition, what is added by breaking down thinking vs. feeling types? Is intuition something different than this? I think wonder and imagination (which I’ve heard described in conjunction with intuition) have an emotional component–they are both born of feeling. Wonder is a feeling. It seem more likely that everything originates first with feeling or an emotional response to stimuli. This is my sense of it — feeling is in the middle of it all and the other functions spring as coping mechanisms to basic flight, fight or freeze responses. So I think this is the weakest part of Jung’s theory. And then, how is this dichotomy really useful in understanding personality?
What’s your take on this?
I’m wondering what you think of the proposed thirteenth zodiac sign. I found this site through googling Gemini + INFJ, as apparently my boyfriend is a Gemini according to this new construction, and I’m an INFJ. Random and oddly specific search words often give the best results. Your articles are among the best I’ve seen on MBTI so far. I always described myself as a “frustrated Leo”, as I don’t really have it in me to want to lead others. Cancer suits me much better – oddly “knowing” this now takes some pressure off, stops me from feeling I was meant to make an impact in a Leo way, but failed.
Part of me doesn’t put much stock in astrology, to be honest. There’s an element of luck involved, in being assigned a star sign that you can vibe with in a way that affects you in a wholly positive way. And now to discover that many people have been operating with potentially inaccurate star personas in mind…it makes me see how we construct our egos in a new light. I had a friend in university who was the consumate Pisces. She believed in this stuff and lived it. I forget her birthday, but she might very well be a different sign. We tell ourselves these stories, using these systems, and it seems to me that this can be how we wind up constructing our identities. I see this too in how people sometimes seem to be using Myers-Briggs. It’s a fine line between finding and making a correlation. I didn’t discover MBTI until I was in my thirties, and although this might have helped me through a lot of confusion (particularly trying to understand INFPS), I’m glad it didn’t play a role in how I saw myself during any formative years.
For every good and fruitful system there is a drawback, and I believe that these pre-made ideations are great tools for self discovery, but I also believe that if we let them take over they can get in the way of doing the real work of self actualization. People forget sometimes that they are unique, especially those of us with such a drive to categorize and analyze emotion.
Thanks very much for the great blog. I’ll be reading through more over the next few weeks.
I’m wondering what you think of the proposed thirteenth zodiac sign.
I don’t think anything of it because, if nothing else, adding a thirteenth sign destroys the beautiful symmetry and logic of the current system. And beauty is truth. Western astrology is the most beautiful and elegant system that I know of.
Besides, the whole thirteenth sign thing is based on ignorance about what astrology is and how it has been practiced. The thirteenth constellation of Ophiuchus is not a new discovery. I think people are just bored and grasp onto tidbits that they hear about and make a big deal about it as if something new has occurred (think internet).
Yes, it is true that many people don’t identify with their sun signs (like you don’t identify with Leo). That’s because of temperament. By my lights, your Myers-Briggs temperament is inborn. Your astrology (of which your sun sign is one facet) is like an overlay on that inborn temperament. For example, if you were an INFP with a Leo sun, then, it would be no surprise that you wouldn’t identify with the way Leo is typically described as conquering and dominating because INFPs are not that way. They would probaly identify more with Cancer or Pisces as the way the INFP temperament is usually described is very close to the way the water element in astrology is described.
However, I don’t think the flaw is in the astrological system itself, but, more the way it is used as a way to predict personality or temperament, especially if you confine yourself to the sign the Sun is in at birth. That is not likely to be the strongest influence in any given person’s astrological chart.
Suffice to say, there is a lot to correct about common misconceptions people have either on the for or against side of astrology.
It’s giving me a headache just thinking about it.
Suffice to say, you are still a Leo. Sorry about that. Glad you’re enjoying the blog.