I believe firmly that astrology isn’t a system built to diagnose all of the things that are wrong with you.
While the stems show you a theory of self, the animal branches actually show your behaviors. Every animal type has a different set of survival strategies and habits.
Here’s a bit of information about each of the Ten Heavenly Stems. You can even take a look at the one that is your day stem and see if you relate to it at all.
Let’s look at different arrangements of the trigrams, mythologies behind these arrangements, and applications of the arrangements.
Chinese genders are really invested in family systems. Being female or male is one thing, but being an older or younger sibling is a whole other thing.
The world that Chinese divination describes is a world that is lit by sunlight and moonlight.
Astrological rejection happens when two planets find debility in the signs that the other are in.
Following ghosts does not result in professional success, Gordon writes, but as failure. Following ghosts means that you sit in a room and quietly call attention to the fact that “There’s something in the room with us.”
The eleventh house opposes the fifth house, which is the house of the erotic. It’s both these houses, this axis of the fifth and eleventh, I think, that refers to love.
I’m going to show you five techniques from Abu Mashar for assessing aspects in a chart. Feel free to use a chart that you are familiar with, like your own natal chart, to try them out.
Most astrologers describe the midheaven as having the largest influence on a person out of all of the angles.
There’s a lot of good things in the ninth house—dreams of the future, self belief, and recognition. When you work with the ninth house, the best way to start is to ask yourself about your relationship to these things.
There is a sense of lack of control with the eighth house. What do we tend to do when we anticipate lack of control? We tend to hang onto things tighter. That’s the eighth house.
Firmicus calls the seventh house Dysis, who was goddess of the sunset. The seventh house is a deeply yellow house where all things come to rest.
The best way to describe the sixth house is that it is the place of needed interdependence. It opposes the twelfth house, which is the place of isolation.
There is no self correction in the fifth house but there is control. Pleasure is an automatic process but it eludes you when you have no control over your environment or decisions.
There is loss in the fourth house but there is a sense of return as well.
For those of us who are burdened with the task of translation (and, with it, treason), for those of us who must translate our own bodies, the third house is not about conducting measured rituals with store bought products. It’s about the terror of the body and becoming familiar with that terror until it is no longer normalized.
When I talk to people about their second houses, we talk about addiction, about recovery, about power struggles, about feeling owned by the ways in which you seek to break free from someone, and about the fear of loss.
The first house is where Saturn aspires towards Mercury. It’s where incarnation aspires towards change.
Planets in fall are sarcastic. They’re satirical. They can be funny but they don’t have to be. They understand tragedy.
