WHAT ASTROLOGY MEANS TO ME by Nascita Williams

It's the final session of a ten-week introduction to astrology down at the local community education centre, and the participants are saying what they've got out of it. There's fascination; those who've stayed with it are well hooked, but what moves me is the avowal from one, "I've got to know myself better", and from another, "I know it, but when I see it in my chart I REALLY know it".

That's it for me, the reflective function of the chart that seems so necessary and so healing - a Moon function, if you like. Someone asked me years ago, "What if my chart does show what I'm like? How does that help?" I couldn't articulate it then but she found it for herself when I did a consultation with her years later: the child in us feels recognised and acknowledged by the world in a way that is reassuring and pleasurable, like a mother's greeting.

But astrology also has an important Saturnian function for me as a source of security, and a way of grounding and preserving what I understand. I couldn't do without my birth chart, the skeleton, the bony frame of my self-understanding, fleshed out with experience, and which I can clothe with insights from any source. I love having somewhere to put, as well as to discover, ideas about what makes me and others tick that will keep them faithfully without withering or cramping them, without pathologising or idealising them. Symbols are such capacious cupboards; so much can be stored in them and so much can be found.

Sense of wonder
From my 5th House Leo Sun I love astrology because it's beautiful and exciting. A birth chart is an abstract painting, a symbolic portrait - and the universe is the artist! I don't understand how this can be but I reliably find it to be so and I think it's wonderful. With Mercury conjunct Saturn in Virgo I have an inner critic that can be sceptical to the point of cynicism, so every time I draw up a chart I wonder "Is this absurd?" Every time I talk to someone about their chart some inner voice asks, "Am I making this all up?" even as I'm pointing out the significators that suggest the interpretation. The rediscovery that the patterns the chart shows do manifest in people's lives, that charts do make sense, still gives me real gooseflesh, even after ten years.

So in my life astrology serves important ego functions reflecting and connecting, grounding and containing, affirming and vivifying - in its way it is Moon, Saturn and Sun to me. It also puts me in touch with transpersonal energies, as is appropriate when you consider that a birth chart is a portrait of the human psyche - and also of a moment in the life of the universe. Even that idea is mind-wobbling....a spatial picture of time!

Transpersonal energies
I love astrology because it points to that which is unpredictable, mysterious and dangerous - life. I don't expect to be able to predict exactly how a transit, for example, will manifest in someone's life; I'll get an educated idea but I expect life to be more inventive than my imagination and to be able to surprise me. Uranus (Sophia, Queen of Heaven, Lady Life) rarely disappoints me. Through Neptune, I recognise that astrology can be a self-glamourising activity, a charismatic, star-spangled cloak, hiding what may be less than wholesome - and I have often been led astray through enchantment. It's an attractive option to mask one's pain and shortcomings by becoming something "special" like an astrologer, and it can be easier to say, "It's my Venus/Mars square" rather than "I feel visciously jealous". I need Neptune's salt water of shared human pain to heal, not conceal, my hurts.

How secretly tempting it can be to assume power not properly our own and be invasively judgmental of others: "With a chart like that, no wonder you're a power-crazed neurotic", or whatever. Of course, I would never say such a thing, but even to think it, and to hold on to the thought in satisfaction at my own superiority, is an ego-serving use of information from a transpersonal source, and guard my lips as I may, the symbolism of Pluto teaches me that such hubris will undo me - life will be served, not my own ends. I love the challenge of such responsibility, the sense of playing for real stakes.

Personal viewpoint
All this has been about astrology in general, and here I am writing for the English Huber School's Newsletter. I'll leave it to others to do justice to the Huber approach, but I'll just finish by saying that that I would currently be in depression, if not bewilderment and despair, if I didn't know that at 46 one passes through the Low Point of the whole chart, a time for inner review and reorientation before emerging into the wider perspectives of the 9th House. I don't say it resolves all the issues or makes this time joyful, but it really does transform the experience to be able to see, at least dimly, what's going on, and to discern some point to it. Of all the ways in which I love astrology for helping me to connect what is within me to what I find in the world, I am deeply grateful for this right now

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