10 Years of Narrative Astrology
My journey with narrative astrology began in 2015 with a business card. I was on my way to my first conference as a professional astrologer. Freshly out of my Saturn return, I was stepping into a new career and a phase of adulthood as wobbly as a fawn, eager and unsure. My mentor encouraged me to get business cards to exchange with colleagues, which made my new profession feel more real… but maybe a little too real.
I designed the cards myself with a template I found on the internet, and I agonized about what I should put in the “job title” space. I was an astrologer, yes, but that didn't feel like enough. It felt too flimsy. It didn't do enough to support my right to be there.
Why did the world need another astrologer?
I thought of the professional astrologers I knew who hated writing and struggled to put their unique insights into words outside the consultation room. I didn’t have that struggle, and I thought there might be something in that. Maybe I could offer my background in the literary world as a gift to the community.
I wrote Narrative / Astrology in the “job title” space. And then I forgot about it until I gave my mentor a card just before the conference. He stared at the card for a long time.
"Narrative astrology," he said finally. "Don't forget that. It's going to be important."
I didn't realize it at the time, but the instinct that I needed a strong name to lean on was more important than calming imposter syndrome before my first conference.
What has changed in the last decade?
When I was heading off to that conference ten years ago, the argument over fate and free will was at the center of debate in the astrology community. For years, emphasizing human agency had been considered vital for the ethical, psychologically healthy practice of astrology. With the rise in popularity of ancient philosophies like Stoicism, these underlying principles came into question.
For a variety of reasons, fatalistic astrology has now become mainstream, and there are ways in which I think the critique of the emphasis on free will was vital. Given what we know about systems, is it right for us to say that the agency of the individual is everything? While it’s true that people can do extraordinary things in difficult circumstances, what do we lose when we talk as if everyone is starting with the same advantages in life?
I believe that astrology doesn’t give a complete picture of the world unless it is able to talk about systemic factors and privilege, and ancient astrological techniques give us a language to talk about these very real 21st century problems
These ancient techniques also speak to people.
Many people born at night don’t resonate with their sun signs, but they feel more seen when I pull in ideas about sect from Hellenistic astrology. I had been taught that there are no good or bad places for planets to be, but I noticed that people with planets that are debilitated in the essential dignity system tend to have legitimate struggles in life because there are things about debilitated planets that threaten systems of power.
The irony is, the more I acknowledged struggles with things outside my clients’ control, the more empowered my clients felt, the more free they felt to act with agency.
Fate + Free Will = Story
As I tinkered and experimented, it became evident that my literary background didn’t just make me “good with words.” I needed deconstructionism to help me break down dysfunctional stories that were keeping my clients down and help me graft Hellenistic techniques onto my evolutionary roots.
Then, one day I remembered those old business cards. I realized that story was the glue that tied the astrology of fate and free will together.
We see the world through the lens of stories. Every interpretation of every astrological symbol is a story. Story shapes the way that we experience reality, telling our brains what the world is and how it works. Every story we adopt (consciously or not) is a story that our brains will happily find evidence for.
Stories shape our lives, but consciousness shapes stories. When we become aware of stories we don’t like, we can reject them. We can ask the world to show us evidence that those stories aren’t true. Sometimes, making a positive change in your life is simply a matter of saying “this isn’t the way I want the world to be” and then discovering that the story you dislike isn’t all there is.
But even when reality fights back, we can create stories that we want to be true and fight to make them true. This is how we become heroes in our own life stories, and it is how we create coalitions that can successfully take on systemic oppression.
Why do we need (narrative) astrology now?
As I was working on this essay, I stumbled on a lecture by the historian Timothy Syder celebrating the paperback release of his book On Freedom. He talked about the importance of stories we tell about time. When we fall into fatalism, believing that the outcome of the future is inevitable, we hand our power over to strongmen who have no qualms about deciding the future for us.
I believe that astrology is experiencing a resurgence because astrology can teach us what it means to live with freedom.
Learning to speak a symbolic language like astrology opens your mind to possibility. We are used to working with languages in which each letter and word means one thing, but symbolic languages force us to deal with webs of interconnected ideas without distilling the web down to a single thing. Talking about Venus without narrowing down the thousand things Venus can mean helps you realize that uncertainty is just another way of talking about potential.
The difference between uncertainty and potential isn't just a matter of semantics. It has deeply important implications for how you move through the world. If you can sit with uncertainty–acknowledging that a Venus transit could (and probably will) mean this and this and this–you move beyond the reach of stories of inevitability and fatalism.
How can the future possibly have only one outcome when the present isn’t even only one thing?
When you believe the future isn’t fixed, it is easier to believe that your choices matter. You begin to notice options that you wouldn’t have seen before. You notice that many of these options can't be distilled to simple “right and wrong” but conflicts between valid stories about what's important. It is when we choose to live from that place, seeing our lives as stories in which we are acting out our values through our choices, that we are free and become ourselves.
I know this is true because I have lived it. I know the comfort of believing that I know the inevitable story of the end of history, and I know the pain of freedom. I have had to choose between freedom and loyalty, singing my daughter to sleep and talking someone off a ledge. It is painful to realize that being a good person can't be as simple as always making the single right choice, but uncertainty and potential is the other side of hope.
People can live without a lot of things–but not hope.
Astrology can help us liberate ourselves from a future that is bound for inevitable collision, but it only has this power because it can be used to hand over our freedom, too.
We can use the cyclical nature of astrology to tell a story in which the past and the future orbit each other in an unending plot we are unable to change. Demoralized by fatalism, we fail to act, and the future we fear becomes true, reinforcing the narrative of powerlessness we have attached ourselves to.
Or, we can see the past as a map of a single path through an infinitely branching web of potential. We can choose to walk over the footprints of those who have walked before, or we can choose a different way and write a new story with the infinite variety of options the astrological language of time presents to us.
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