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3:48am August 18, 2014

lichgem:

I finally found a website to do my full Zodiac chart for me. I don’t remember everything, because it’s a lot of information to take in and I didn’t spend much time reading it, but I remember that I’m hella earthy. I had more signs governed by earth than any other. Second to that, fiery. I think I got Leo under three different planets, and then a second Sagittarius. No air to speak of, and only one water sign, Scorpio.

It can get complicated, though.

Like… I’m super watery, not just because of what planets are where, but because I have Neptune in the first house in a super-prominent position in my chart in which Neptune is connected to just about every other planet in a major way.  Scary thing is, being both very watery and very Neptunian fits me to the core.  The only thing not-Neptunian about me is that I’m not an actual fraud, but having been accused of fraud maybe makes up for that.

Also, Anne and I did our charts for fun, and the scary thing?  They look like the same chart.  I mean they look like someone took the same pieces and rearranged them in a slightly different order.  Even people who know nothing about astrology have looked at ours and gone “whoah”.  

I’ve looked at a lot of charts before, and I’ve never seen two that look so interlocking as mine and Anne’s do.  An ex-astrologer friend says she has seen two charts like that, but that it’s very rare, and it generally either means that two people have a very intense connection, or that they’re going to be sworn enemies, but very little in between.

I’m not sure how much I believe in astrology.  I certainly don’t think it’s a good thing for predicting your personal future.  But I do think it can be a way to see patterns that you can’t see in other ways, like  a way to engage the pattern-looking-for part of your mind so you can see things you couldn’t otherwise see.  And doing that with my own chart, I can definitely see aspects of my personality that I couldn’t see before.

My chart involves actually something I’ve talked about on here before – there’s a lot of interlocking fire-and-air, and a lot of interlocking earth-and-water, and not a lot of connection points between the two of those patterns.  Although my ex-astrologer friend said that they were going to start losing their disconnected quality soon – she said that in the last couple years, and she is right.  Now, I’m starting to feel like one person instead of a person split in two, and it’s amazing.  The split had caused me a lot of grief for a long time.

Anyway, the surprising thing about my chart was how right it was, like the more I learned about astrology, the more I learned that my chart was actually a highly accurate description of me.  I guess my prejudices made me expect it to be totally random nonsense, but it wasn’t.  The more I learned, the more it all fit together into patterns that made total sense but that I couldn’t translate into words very well.

But I remember when my ex-astrologer friend first explained the position of Neptune in my chart and told me I was the most Neptunean person she’d ever met, and I was pissed off because Neptune is a planet of illusions and stuff.  But she told me that Neptune is basically a very watery planet, and I’m a very very watery person, and that it has these flipsides to it… like it can either bring illusion, or deep insight, and it’s a matter of how you work with it.  And she said that I am in fact prone to illusions, very prone to them, and I learned that was actually true, because of the way my pattern-sensing works, I can pick up patterns that aren’t really patterns, and that was a valuable thing to learn.  But she also said that if I learn to use that pattern-sensing more appropriately, I can have very deep insights into the world, and that this is the flip side.  So I’ve come to accept that Neptune is going to be the most prominent planet in my horoscope regardless of what that means to other people.  It now means to me that it’s both a strength and a challenge in a way, and my choice is to see that it can be a weakness, and compensate for those areas of weakness in order to turn it into a great strength.

And Neptune seems to embody a lot about being highly sensing.  The ability to unconsciously put together patterns and find out information about the world that is hidden from most other people… but also the potential to be led astray by illusions that muck up the sensing process just by way of the vulnerabilities of how sensing works.  (Which is something that Donna Williams, in writing about sensing, is highly unaware of.  And I’ve seen her led badly astray many a time by her belief that sensing is basically infallible.  Learning about Neptune made me far more cautious about insights gleaned from sensing, and far more likely to double-check them through other means.)  It’s considered both a planet of illusion and a planet of deep insight, and which one it is depends a lot on how cautious you are not to be taken in by the illusions, and to hone the skills that will bring you more insights and fewer illusions.  Pretty much everything about Neptune applies to me except the ‘fraud’ thing, and even then fraud is something I’ve been accused of wrongly more than any person should be, so that too fits in its own twisted way.  

Sorry to go on about this.  I haven’t looked at my full horoscope in a long, long time, nor analyzed it like that.  I still have it saved on my iPod somewhere, along with Anne’s, which looks like a slightly rearranged version of mine.  (We’ve got almost the same House positions despite being born totally different months and years, and we’ve got a lot of the same planet configurations, or configurations that are mirror images of each other or other weird things like that.  It’s very strange.  I’ve never been one to believe in things like horoscopes, but there’s some pattern there that is being picked up on that seems to be real.  And reading my own chart in depth has taught me that, again, there’s something to the patterns you can pick up on if you learn enough about it to read it properly.)

And yes, I know the position of the stars is not what it was when they first drew up these charts, like the constellations are in different places.  But given that the constellations are just a convenient way to mark out twelve equal parts of the sky, that’s not really a problem when you’re just using it to find patterns.  I found that once I understood the houses, the zodiac, the planets, and the angles formed between the planets, I could read my chart well enough to see patterns and things about myself I’d never noticed before, but that were highly valuable information.  YMMV of course.  It can just be fun, after all, even if you don’t believe there’s any knowledge to be gained.  Just if you believe in it at all, don’t hand out your information to random people, because there are people who will use it to gain information about you that you wouldn’t want them to have.

Anyway there’s a lot of different ways that things can be prominent.  Like, for me, Neptune and water are so prominent not just because of things being in watery signs or something, but because Neptune is sitting right in my first house and is prominently connected to every other planet.  So that means that water is important to me and Neptune in particular is extremely important to me.  So there’s many different ways for an element to achieve prominence in a horoscope.

And… I can’t believe I know this much about astrology.  It’s almost embarrassing considering I grew up interested in science and astrology was the ultimate pseudoscience.  So it’s almost embarrassing to say I believe in it to any degree.  I certainly don’t believe in newspaper astrology, I don’t believe astrology can tell you the future either, nor especially not your own future.  But I think it can help you focus your mind to gain insights made by patterns, the same way you can use any set of conditions at a certain time to gain insights from the patterns.  Astrology is just a highly sophisticated means of drawing out those patterns and looking at them.  But even as it can give you insight, it’s also good not to take it too seriously, because… well it’s kind of like Neptune that way too, it can give insight and it can give illusions at the same time.

But it’s a lot of fun either way whether you believe in it a lot, a little, or not at all.