by Bruce Scofield

This fall we'll see some potent planetary combinations in close proximity. In October Saturn and Pluto form their second square on the 9th and Uranus and Neptune conjoin for the third time on the 25th. To complicate things further, Mercury moves retrograde on the 25th roughly square to Saturn and conjunct Pluto with Mars nearby. What a mess! We all know changes are in the works but apparently we need some more time to get used to it. Most likely, this late October combination will coincide with a mess on President Clinton's lap as he tries to push health care, free trade (NAFTA) and ReGo (Al Gore's reinvention of government). How ambitious he is to do all of this as Pluto and Saturn square and oppose his Sun. Good luck Bill!

Now what does all this concentrated planetary power mean to you and me? Simply put, Saturn and Pluto force us to make responsible changes and Uranus and Neptune trick us into reforming our visions. We are the dancers and actors in a cosmic play directed by the planets. We can respond unconsciously which might be OK if maybe the natal Moon and other subconscious indicators in the chart are well placed. But many people who live their lives unconsciously are likely to be jerked around by these planetary combinations. They resist changes and finally outside forces work on them to begin the inevitable process. They make it worse for everyone else because they hold up change until its thrust on them. They are like sleepwalkers behind the wheel of a car at a traffic circle -- we have to watch out for them. Astrology is the conscious way, the spiritual path of conscious living. So it seems we must offer some advice for the unconscious as we ap_proach this concentrated burst of pure planetary hell.

According to the philosophy of Symbolic Substitution, developed by Antipodes Astrologicon and Dr. Barry Orr, any planetary combination extends its influence within limited parameters. Saturn will only work properly in the realm of things ruled by Saturn. If we are unconscious and have a strong hard Saturn transit, then we will experience problems with knees, teeth, brakes, fences, old people, authorities, organizational matters, etc. In the operational aspect of the philosophy of Symbolic Substitution the experiencer of the transit consciously chooses the field onto which the planetary influence will be felt. In other words, the experiencer elects a zone or zones in life that will take the brunt of the transit, progression, etc. So, from this perspective, we consciously direct planetary influences to appropriate areas of life. The following is this columnist's advice for those interested in practicing Symbolic Substitution.
 
 

The Top Ten Things to do Under the Saturn/Pluto Square

1. Ritually detonate a model volcano in your back yard every Saturday.

2. Put a toilet in your basement. (This will require you to break the concrete floor and tie into the main waste drain under your house).

3. Do some spelunking (cave exploration) and study the geology of caves. (Another alternative would be night scuba diving.)

4. Organize your investments in stocks and mutual funds. Change insurance companies and clean up any questionable areas in your taxes.

5. Have sex in tight spaces. (Recommended: closets, the backseat of a Volkswagon bug, airplane restrooms, changing rooms in clothing stores, caves, and bathrooms in basements. You may also want to add an element of fear and guilt by doing it at a time when you may be caught.)

6. Change the transmission on your car or replace all or part of the brake operation system, ie. the fluid reservoirs, master cylinder, brake lines and brake slave cylinders. (If this doesn't work, have some surgery on yourself.)

7. Have a high colonic. Get into colonic therapy. Make friends with your lower intestine.

8. Dig a new hole for that old outhouse.

9. Bring all those concrete slabs and old bones you've got stacked in the garage down to the recycling center.

10. Indulge in your feelings by wearing black, listening to the blues and drinking a strong, dark beer like Old Peculiar.
 
 

The Top Ten Things to do Under the Uranus/Neptune Conjunction

1. Pretend to be someone who is the exact opposite of who you were yesterday.

2. Start a campaign to license psychic astrologers. (Another option is to become a trendy mythic astrologer).

3. Decorate your bathtub or swimming pool with colorful holiday lighting. (You may also want to do some electrical wiring in your closet so that you can plug in your CD player and lava lamp.)

4. Explore inner space with one of those brain-wave machines and take some high-tech smart drugs. (You could also ritually listen to space music played on electronic instruments.)

5. Join a religious group, then challenge the authorities and start a revolution from inside. Preach that there is no monopoly on truth.

6. Spontaneously, try some coed-naked night swimming at your local swimming hole. Be sure that it is illegal to do this.

7. Move to a place where you can't possibly fit in. Then move again within six months to a place that makes its very, very easy for you to fit in.

8. Spend an hour each day meditating on how impossible it is to believe simultaneously in contradictory ideologies or belief systems. Become a Buddhist and find the void.

9. Talk with others about religious or spiritual matters via a computer network.

10. Light up and listen to space music with a strobe light on.
 
 

Not Again!

In last month's column I started to run on about astrological certification and the selling of astrology. I believe that these topics are of extreme importance to all of us in astrology and we must soon move ourselves to a better position in order to suc_cessfully counteract the forces that oppose us. We all know that mainstream science and the academic world are no friends to astrology. But I suspect most of us believe that those who read New Age magazines are, right? Maybe not. In the current issue of Gnosis magazine (#29, Fall 1993) is a piece that makes astrology look like a charade. This is a magazine that runs articles on Jung, Atlantis, Kabbalah and the astral body. What is going on here?

The article in question is by Ted Schultz, who was a former managing editor of Whole Earth Review. Now the various Whole Earth (catalog) publications are the product of Stewart Brand, a guy who was never a friend to astrology. So what we have here is the latest extension of a long-time indirectly expressed hostili_ty to astrology by persons who work the edge between the New Age movement and the fringes of socially sanctioned psycho/science (ie. Omni magazine, Whole Earth Review, transpersonal psychology, etc.). As astrologers, we need to recognize what these people are saying about us and respond quickly. The fact of the matter is that they probably have more status then we and are therefore more influential in high places. Unless we let them know we are able to respond in force, united, this will go on and on. Our greatest weakness as members of a discipline is our inability to act in concert -- the sad fact is that we are a bunch of uncom_promising individuals struggling to find a place in an outsiders pecking order. Or we are a bunch of uncompromising individuals creating our own little universe and pretending that the outside world does not exist.

Anyway, the article, a "Skeptic's Corner" piece titled "Scientific Tests of Astrology," begins with Schultz zooming in on astrology as a kind of therapy supported by the assumption that the natal chart gives significant information about a client's personality. It's the truth of this assumption that Schultz is questioning throughout the rest of this article. He says early on that if it is true then astrology is indeed an important psychological technique, but if it is not, then it is unnecessary and misleading and that astrologers should be held to the same legal requirements as therapists.

The main body of the piece is an evaluation of an astrological test conducted by physicist Shawn Carlson who reported his re_sults in the Dec. 5, 1985 issue of the prestigious science journal Nature. This was an interesting and unique test that was supported by the NCGR (National Council for Geocosmic Research) and one that I participated in. In one part of the test, subjects were asked to rank three astrological birth chart reports done by professional astrologers according to how close they matched their own understanding of who they were (one of these was the correct one). The results showed that the subjects were just as likely to choose the wrong reports as the true ones. The second part of the test had astrologers compare their own interpretation of a natal chart with three psychological reports, one of which was correct. The reports were California Personality Inventory profiles, approved for use by the NCGR. The results were that astrologers only made the correct match one-third of the time.

Schultz also called up a test done by Geoffrey Dean in which he asked 90 astrologers to rank the 60 most extroverted, 60 most stable, and 60 most introverted persons from a sample of 1,198 subjects who took the Eysenck Personality Inventory. Half of the astrologers used birth charts to make this pick and half guessed. Guess what, the astrologers with charts did no better then their chartless counterparts. Schultz also mentions the Gauquelin work, but only briefly, and he only really dwells on the fact that these studies do not support the techniques of the astrological tradition. He also mentions at the top of a paragraph that Michel Gauquelin was an "adamant debunker of astrology" which is not exactly true. (See the excellent article on the late Michel Gauquelin in FATE, August 1993).

So with three tests of astrologers that proved nothing, and one lonely Gauquelin proving things that are irrelevant to astrologers, Schultz thinks he has an excellent case for burying astrology and concludes that astrologers are bogus therapists. Great thinking, Ted. You've decided that astrology is only astrologers reading charts for clients, you mixed apples (psychology tests) with oranges (birthcharts) and you hold astrologers to standards that no other respected professions (doctors, psychologists, plumbers, etc.) are held to.

One of the facts of, at least, American life that has been obvious to me for most of my astrological career is that few people know themselves. I am constantly astounded by the lack of self-knowledge that apparently intelligent and successful people have about themselves. Worse yet, many of them (primarily males) will challenge any suggestions that they are anything other than what they believe themselves to be. (This is why females get more astrology readings then males -- they are more aware of their subjective states and hence are more open to self-searching.) When it comes to soul-searching, American culture is skin deep. We are a lucky people who have never had to really ask what we did wrong. That's why Viet Nam was, and still is, something we don't know what to do with. This country produces the finest objectivists in all fields, including astrology. Family life in this country is protrayed on a comic book level. No one knows who they are because it's not necessary for economic success and, in fact, probably works against it. To base an astrology test on a randomly selected person's ability to understand themselves is ridiculous.

Shultz's article was shown to me by Valerie Vaughan who made some interesting comments of her own. To her, the notion that astrologers should be able to get a psychological profile right the first time was ridiculous. In a letter to Gnosis she writes:

"Why would anyone go and obtain a second opinion for the same condition from different practitioners? Because experts, in this case the counseling field, vary in their individual opinions of how different test results are interpreted to form a diagnosis and plan of treatment. Psychotherapists use test results but their tests are field standardized according to agreed-upon criteria, namely statistically-supported norms that are proven through accepted scientific methods. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to try to compare astrologers with ministers or philosophers who also have non-provable sources of inspiration but are not required to prove them."

Vaughan's point about the field standardized tests is a good one. It has always seemed to me that if astrologers could produce a general personality theory that is supported by planetary symbolism, then they could prove it using statistics. The sad fact is that we astrologers don't have the time or funding to do this. I keep trying to promote an 8-level planetary model but only rarely get a response.

For me the really big problem with this article lies in its assumption that astrology is only a kind of therapy. It's true that in the 20th Century the main thrust of astrology has been on the human condition and that the reading of birth charts is now the centerpiece of the field. But this is a historical trend and astrology has been around for a long, long time. What about mundane astrology, electional astrology, horary astrology, astro-meteorology and agricultural astrology? Does a test that appears to have failed invalidate these important cornerstones of our subject? Schultz's article never once suggests that astrology is more than what he sees as being clearly debunked. All of this leads to what I (and I think you should also) fear the most; the dismantling of astrology by the scientific and academic world and the assumption of many of its elements by psychology, meteorology, biology, etc. I may be alarmist, but I sense that if we do not get our field policed, integrated and alert, we may lose a lot of it. We will be left with a few crumbs and it will be our fault.

Proving astrology is indeed difficult, and especially so in the field of natal astrology. I think Astro-meteorology would be a much better place to start. Back in the 1960's some very solid work on rainfall and the lunar cycle was documented and reported on in the prestigious science journal Science. Nothing major has been reported on since then, however. It seems that today we astrologers are all struggling to survive. We have no funding.

For the time being, why don't some of you take a look at Shultz's article and write Gnosis a letter. Maybe we can start a high-profile discussion. Hopefully, this will be carried on by the more level-headed members of our community and not ruined by the cranks in our midst, who will certainly get the ears of our opposition.