Master’s Musings, March 2023

 

 

Bless us all – but with that enthusiasm and excitement, there often comes partisanship and the desire to make everybody else’s system wrong. I guess that’s what makes the world go ‘round, but that kind of intolerance has never brought out the best in anyone. That’s the main thing I want to address in this newsletter.

I hope that I have made myself clear – I embrace the astrological researchers and I am grateful for what they are doing. As some of you perhaps know, my first (unpublished) book actually was about such a project. Back right after I finished college, I’d been working on a study for the National Institute of Mental Health. In a flagrant abuse of your tax dollars, I was able to sneak-peek a correlation of people’s Sun Signs with their personality profiles. I got statistically significant results in many cases, and I wrote a book about it. In classic Jupiter fashion, the fact that my efforts were never accepted for publication was among “the best things that ever happened to me,” even though it didn’t feel that way at the time. If it had gone to print, I would have been branded as a statistical researcher, and that simply was not my path.

 

Lately, I’ve heard some scuttlebut…

 

 

Lately, I’ve heard some scuttlebutt about a few “evidence-based” astrologers dismissing evolutionary astrology for its alleged lack of an empirical basis. The last thing I want to do is to get into an argument with those people – as I’ve said, astrological researchers have my enthusiastic support. But in what remains of this newsletter, I want to arm you against any such attacks you might encounter.

The first response I would suggest is what I’ve been saying all along – God bless us one and all. We welcome any new evidence or insights into our sacred craft. To all of you evidence-based astrologers, thank you for your hard work. Show us what you’ve got.

Beyond that, let me say that there is a basic problem with all such statistical astrological research. It’s far from a reason not to do that kind of work, nor is it insurmountable, but it needs to be understood clearly. Here it is: every astrological configuration interacts creatively and unpredictably with the consciousness of the individual. What happens in life is not simply a function of the astrological configuration – it’s about the response the individual makes to it. Thus, every symbol in astrology represents a spectrum of possibilities. They are moving targets, in other words. That makes them hard to pin down statistically.

Here’s a specific example of what I’m talking about.

 

 

I read a study once which described a correlation between alcoholism and Moon-Neptune oppositions. (My apologies that I can’t give you a citation on it – I don’t remember, but I think I read it in The Mountain Astrologer.)  No surprise there though – it’s easy to believe in such a correlation. In fact, a warning about escapism in general would be part of any competent evolutionary astrologer’s analysis of such a Moon-Neptune chart.

But think of all the people with Moon-Neptune oppositions who are avid, tea-totalling meditators. Or visionary artists. Or animators. Or interpreters of dreams. Or filmmakers. Or pharmacists. Or ayahuasqueros. Or deep-sea sailors. Or sommeliers. Or hallucinating psychotics. Or fine actors. Or shamans.

The list of possibilities is long, in other words. That’s what I mean by “moving targets.” This is what makes statistical studies of astrology so hard – the drunken Moon-Neptune types are definitely in there, but the presence of these other equally Moon-Neptune types blurs the numbers, and makes any “this means that” kind of astrological analysis extraordinarily difficult.

Then there’s a point that is obvious to any practicing astrologer.

 

 

We all know that nothing in a chart ever operates in a vacuum. The planets all flavor each other. Mercury may be Mercury, but my Mercury and yours operate differently – unless the rest of your chart is the same as mine, and not even really then. At the risk of very minor over-simplification, no chart is ever repeated exactly. Statistics, by definition, only have meaning when you have a large number of cases against which to compare your hypotheses. Here’s where that line of reasoning goes – if, say, you could find 2000 people with Steven Forrest’s chart, how many of them would have turned out to be astrologers? 

Start with the problem that you cannot find 2000 people with my chart, and from there proceed to the problem that even if you could, there are many other paths I (or they) could have gone down, some high, some low – and that whole diverse range of possible lives would be reflected in that population of “Steven Forrests” (even though it doesn’t really exist in the first place.)

I say all of this not as a criticism of astrological researchers, but in sympathy with them. What they are doing is very difficult.

Let’s go a step further.

 

 

Earlier this year, David Cochrane published his book, The Astrology of Bipolar Disorder. You can get it on Amazon. He’s smart, competent, and honest. I am sure his work is solid. I’ve not gotten around to reading it yet myself, but I will – and I know it will make me a better astrologer. How? If I see his diagnostic patterns for bipolar disorder in the chart of a client, I will be alerted to that possibility – but I will also know that there are other possibilities. Would I even say to the client “I see a chance of bipolar disorder in your chart?.” I doubt it – that would sow unnecessary, and perhaps totally ungrounded, seeds of anxiety. Instead, I’d emphasize the higher ground and how to get there. I might make vague reference to “mental instability” as one possible result of not striving for the higher ground – and I really believe that. That’s because the very heart of evolutionary astrology lies in that kind of thinking. We can’t control the universe, but we can certainly take a high degree of personal responsibility for how we embody our charts.

One final thought.

 

 

If an evidence-based astrologer gets on your case for the apparent “lack of evidence” for evolutionary astrology, here’s the best response I know. Start with the notion that full-power astrology must always be based on the full, individual, unrepeatable birthchart. As we have seen, that’s hard to study statistically, but there is a way: unleash thousands of astrologers, all practicing different methods, on a large human population. Stand back and watch for twenty years or so. See which astrologers have clients coming back to them year after year, recommending them to their friends, and trusting them with their children. 

That’s your test. Crowdsource your answer, in other words. Use a sample of millions of people. That’s how we can compare different astrological theories in the real world of actual human beings with their full birthcharts. People know if the astrologer is speaking to them in a helpful, resonant way – or not. And that is a far harder test to pass than proving that Venus in Libra means your favorite color is green or any such thing.

That is the test that evolutionary astrology has been passing ever more wisely and spectacularly over the past fifty years or so. That’s your answer. That’s your evidence for any “evidence-based” astrologer who’s trying to shame you or disrespect the work we do because we “don’t have numbers to prove it.”

Just look. We do have the numbers.