The previous post referred to astrology, which is one of my most reluctant interests. I have scorned it most of my life, and only began to be persuaded it had some validity by Jim Eshelman, who has a sidereal astrology forum at Solunars, http://solunars.net/. (The sidereal system is based on the current actual positions of the constellations, where the more usual tropical zodiac assumes they are still where they were two millennia ago when the first known authors began writing about them). Eshelman’s predictive abilities are not flawless, and last year he predicted a John McCain win in the U.S. election. However, his ability to tie people’s (read: “my own”) behavioural patterns to natal planetary configurations impressed me early on, and so I signed on - reluctantly – to the notion that “there might be something to it all.” The reluctance remains, even if over the years, I have lost a lot of my resistance to the analysis of a person’s psyche by means of a chart. Actual prediction, as Yogi Berra noted, is always a dicey business, especially when it concerns the future.

A couple of centuries ago, the notion of our nature and our fate being indicated by the heavens would have been taken for granted the way I assume electrical current will flow and create heat when I plug in a kettle. For ages, astrology was a dangerous profession not because of the risk of being accused of fraud, but because the astrologer might be privy to state or royal secrets through his art. Deep skepticism on the matter became the approved scientific stance, and that remains the case.

The ‘causes’ of celestial influence are the biggest stumbling block for most of us. We can rule out gravity, electromagnetic radiation, light-waves and the objects of study in conventional physics as significant factors. As a result, some people who concede validity to astrology prefer to see it all as a matter of using the subtly varied patterns in the skies as an intricately complex template onto which we can project our own best intuitions, with the most insightful people ‘winning.’ Others follow a Jungian cop-out, allowing for the possibility of synchronicity, with the planets above us having no actual connection to us, but simply reflecting a pattern inherent in the nature of things.

I have no theory to offer here, since anything I could say is mired in vaguenesses about wave patterns that sound to my own eyes like dubiously fringe physics. I don’t, frankly, know what I’m talking about in that department, so I can’t verbalise it.

At the same time, I can’t gainsay the occasional stark insights my horoscope has provided. I am, for example, currently going through my second Saturn return, and like the first one 29 years ago, it is rubbing my nose in my own limitations. It’s been hard to post to this blog during this period. My Sun in Libra clarifies to me why I am who I am, as my Virgo Moon clarifies how I present myself and how it appears I’m seen. My Pluto, right on my Ascendant, reflects very precisely the odd, isolated headspace I have always inhabited. And so on, and so on.

I don’t know if these things are ‘why’ I am as I am, or why anyone is the way they are. The main resistance I come across is that of accepting we are linked intimately to forces or archetypes or actual heavenly bodies far beyond the earth’s atmosphere. That the Sun’s rising and setting affect me, I wouldn’t question, and the number of winemakers in Europe (to cite one example) who now follow biodynamic principles based on the phases of the Moon is substantial. Given the Moon’s physical effect on tides, that seems physically plausible. But Mars? Mercury, buzzing around the Sun? Or my current bete noir, Saturn, umpteen gazillion miles out there? Or the frozen Kuiper Belt Object on my Ascendant that isn’t even an official planet any more?

Yet, having looked at it all, and having discussed this stuff with equally doubting people who feel equally odd about it all, but who like me find themselves presented to their own gaze in their charts, I’m stuck. I accept the essential validity of something whose methods usually go beyond me. Transits to sextiles? Semisextiles? Duh, whatever. Yes, I know they’re about different angles, and I can work those out okay. But … so?

My conclusion is that I have no conclusion. I might have been conned into elaborate auto-suggestion, and I might one day decide to drop the whole business.

On the other hand, I might one day have to concede that our links to the stars are deeper and more intimate than we allow ourselves to imagine in these times, and that one day, in addition to standing on other worlds, we will also come to appreciate them in ways we once understood, but have deleted from our modern memory banks.