Astrology

Most people think that astrology is a way of predicting people’s futures by looking at the positions of the stars and planets when they were born. This is a major part of astrology, to be sure, but it’s not the whole story. For our present purposes, we can divide astrology into active magic and divination.

As active magic, astrology is really a kind of magical medicine. People are influenced by rays coming down from the heavens, and these rays incline them towards certain kinds of behavior, mental and physical health conditions, and general personal status. For example, a very Solar person is outgoing and “bright” (in lots of senses of the word), so if you can make a person more solar, he will be more successful at solar activities. People have natural inclinations, which is to say that they are naturally more or less influenced by one sort of rays or another, depending on their natal (and other) horoscopes. By using various lists of colors, metals, places, times, plants, and so forth, you can make a person more readily influenced by the desired rays, and less influenced by the others. So if a person naturally tends to be Saturnian (melancholic, depressed, moody, introverted), you can make her more Solar to counteract this effect.

As divination, astrology can be used to read the future of any situation, not just a person’s, and furthermore when it deals with people it isn’t limited to their natal horoscopes. For example, very complex techniques can be employed to read the future of a marriage, a war, or an entire empire. The essential point about astrology is that the future is eminently mutable: by forms of the active techniques described above, you can alter the future, because you can make a bad situation better, or a good situation go bad.

To Fake this, you’re going to want a few charts of astrological associations for metals, colors, places, times, and so forth. A good text here is Bill Whitcomb’s The Magician’s Companion: A Practical and Encyclopedic Guide to Magical and Religious Symbolism, 2d ed. (St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 1993), from which you can excerpt the bits on twelve (zodiac) and seven (planets).

See Astrology^?

-- ChrisLehrich^? - 24 Dec 2004