11:59pm May 13, 2014

childhoodreclaimed-lichgem-i-like-to-think

youneedacat:

lichgem:

childhoodreclaimed:

childhoodreclaimed:

lichgem:

I like to think about Zodiac signs

My sun sign is Virgo, and my moon sign is Sagittarius

That means my elements are earth and fire

Like… a volcano?

Also it’s good to not have to live up to Virgo’s reputation of fastidiousness because I can just be like…

:D Oh, all of those Taurus things fit me very well. That’s funny. Is it silly that when you said that we were under the same element, I felt excited about that? Like, yay, my lich friend and I are earth buddies!

It’s not silly, it’s sweet xD

Let me see if I can find a thing to calculate moon sign for you! Er, if you want me to, that is.

I did my entire chart once, and the interconnections between everything fit me rather well. Neptune (highly watery) was ridiculously prominent (I have a ridiculously watery personality), I had a lot of fire, with air densely packed together with it, in one spot, and earth and water disconnected from it elsewhere, which is bizarre considering for most of my life I’d felt like I had fire and air in one place, then earth and water in another place, and the two weren’t connecting. (But now they’re beginning to connect and it’s wonderful and beautiful to see who I am with all four mixed together in proper proportions.) Horoscopes can be really interesting if you don’t try to use them to tell the future, and if you just learn all the different meanings and how they fit together. It’s like a language for talking about the world, even if you don’t believe you can tell anything from reading them. It’s still a language, very artistic and mathematical and intellectually satisfying.

Weirdly enough, I took the natal chart of me and Anne once, and they seriously looked so similar that even people with no chart-reading experience could tell. And people who did have experience, said it looked like someone had taken the same exact ingredients and put them together in a slightly different order so that they resonated with each other in a powerful way.

I don’t know how true any of that is, but it was certainly food for thought, and a lot of fun as a puzzle-game type thing. I also strongly believe that even if it has no other value for understanding the world, learning the language of astrology allows you to describe things about the world that you can’t otherwise describe. And that’s my main interest in it, is being able to say something like “Saturn” and have a large clump of meanings come to mind that other people can understand.

(I’m Leo Sun, Libra Moon, Sagittarius rising, FWIW.)

“Horoscopes can be really interesting if you don’t try to use them to tell the future, and if you just learn all the different meanings and how they fit together. It’s like a language for talking about the world, even if you don’t believe you can tell anything from reading them. It’s still a language, very artistic and mathematical and intellectually satisfying.”

This is basically how I think about Tarot. It won’t magically tell you what’s going to happen, but it’s a language for describing the world and it can reveal things you hadn’t noticed about what is happening *right now*.

And both Tarot and Astrology draw on Alchemy, which is also a language for understanding the world and how it works. Basically it comes from a bunch of people (in medieval europe and all around the mediterrranean) who were really into figuring out how the world is put together, and how it is. And so they spent a lot of time observing everything. One of the things that came out of that was (eventually) chemistry. But they were interested in “all the things” and they thought that everything was connected and mirrored everything else, so they watched planets, and chemical reactions, and how people interacted with eachother, and how people came up with ideas to make new things.

And they came up with this way of describing the world. And sometimes it seems weird, because everything is smashed together. And religion wasn’t even separated from science.

But it’s very cool to know. And it can be useful in terms of describing things.

(To the extent that it matters: Sun in Cancer, Moon in Pisces, Pisces everywhere else, lol.)

And sometimes things do fit ridiculously well. I had Neptune in the first house, connected to pretty much every single other planet in the entire horoscope. And my former-astrologer friend pointed out that I am one of the most Neptunian people she’s ever met, with just about everything good and bad that can be associated with it – everything from the capacity for deep spiritual insight, extremely accurate intuition, to extreme capacity for self-deception, a past history of doing too many drugs, and everything that is the element of water, all wrapped up in one. She said the only thing I don’t really have that some people associate with Neptune is deliberate deception, that the deception I have is all self-deception and confusion and that kind of thing. But that even the fact that I get falsely accused of being deceptive a lot, fits.

I didn’t really want to hear that at first, but it turned out to be the truth, and embracing it rather than running from it has really helped me see my strengths and weaknesses better. Even if Neptune hadn’t been so ridiculously prominent in my chart, simply having the language to tell me what Neptune stands for and telling me I’m very Neptunian would’ve given me a lot of insight into my life that I wouldn’t otherwise have. Same for telling me that I’m extremely watery in general – but the water that comes from a temperate rainforest like where I was born, not necessarily other forms of water.

That’s another thing I like about the elements, is that each of them comes in so many different forms, and you can really see those forms when you look at someone who has a lot of one or more of those elements. Anne’s cat Shadow is like liquid sunlight sometimes, glowing lava others, very fiery but only like certain kinds of fire. I have a combination of earth and water that’s very like the soil in a redwood forest, and not so much like the combination of earth and water you’ll see deep in a cave where the water has carved out the rock (although I still feel a kinship there). The elements each come in many different forms doing many different things, and it’s amazing to watch them at work.

Learning about Neptune really helped me, though. In particular, it showed me that my ability to sense things can be wrong. I’d learned about sensing from someone who made it sort of sound like it’s always accurate or it’s not real sensing. But learning about Neptune and intuition taught me that sensing has its drawbacks when not paired with analytical thought, and that it has huge blind spots, and areas where it can be drastically inaccurate. This made my interactions with the person make more sense, because they did often think they were sensing things, but those things didn’t always turn out to be accurate. I was able to learn that sensing can provide great insights, but it does have blind spots, and that it’s good to pair it with other ways of understanding the world, and not to simply rely on it for everything. Because that’s the self-deceptive side of something that can otherwise provide deep insights about the world.

And that’s why I’ve been glad to learn this language about the world – the more I learn it, the more I’m able to understand and communicate about things, that there is no other language or concept for that I can find in ordinary interactions with people.

And knowing I’m very Neptunian and by consequence very watery, it doesn’t just help me see the pitfalls, it also helps me take pride in strengths that I didn’t know I had. I was very resistant to both ideas at first, but after time I could see how they were good as well as bad, that none of these things are all bad or all good, but each has strengths and weaknesses.

Notes: