Living in a Material World... The Dilemmas of Modern Astrology
How do we live in the world of 2025 as astrologers? The challenge is immense and overwhelming. I realised the implications of this challenge particularly as I wandered, talked and thought at the recent Astrological Association conference. We live in a world of multiple meanings, philosophies and identities. I am a grandfather, a Jungian psychotherapist, a citizen and above all an electional astrologer who got elected to my local Council in May 2022.
My philosophy of life is philosophical. I think like Hegel, the German philosopher who was concerned with how contradictions in society struggle with one another. Think of it in the form of hard aspects like the square or the opposition. My Pluto in the first house in Virgo produces strange adaptations and forms as it deals with Venus in Pisces. Indeed, if I use the Placidus house system, that challenge emerges in the 12th house in Leo and the sixth house in Aquarius. Look at your hard aspects and your squares and you understand your own contradictions and your concerns. Trines and sextiles tell us about the ease and skills we naturally have. From who we are to who conditions us, look at those aspects within and without and understand that they may be as difficult as the oppositions. Perhaps the quincunx and the semi-square are things we have not yet understood or even seen.
The Multiple Identities of the Modern Astrologer
Look at all the roles we have and ask yourself: how do I know myself? The astrologer that we become reflects our strengths and weaknesses, our prejudices and perceptions. Educationally, I am influenced by my Classics degree, which makes me prone to be Hellenistic in style, yet it also sets up an understanding of Jung and Freud in modern psychological astrology. It can also make me a bit of a snob intellectually when I experience someone's claim to be a traditional astrologer when I spot that their knowledge of traditional ideas is limited to at best old English. We should all watch our shadow, and at the conference and in every situation I see mine come out to battle and engage with the shadows of others.
My Social Anthropology degree gives me a wide vision of prediction and analysis across many cultures and countries. Yet it allows me to escape into obscure facts and philosophies as a defence mechanism and method of debate. My Philosophy and Literature background is a rich seam of observations and the experience of others' lives and loves that I can use in consultations and psychotherapy. For every gift these educational achievements give me, they bring a curse as well. All that we have and have done, all that we seek to do offers us an opportunity to understand the mosaic of our identities and selves that we use in the world in which we have our life and being.
How do we use our astrology as we live and act? I mentioned earlier that I was elected in May 2022 to my local Council in Ystradgynlais. I sort out the best time to begin the campaign and I look at the transits for particular meetings to recognise whether I will be more successful on a financial matter or health matter. I look at the house position of my allies and enemies. I have worked out by observation, rectification and questioning the Sun, Moon and Ascendant sign of my colleagues upon the Council. It's a useful method of dealing with the multiple challenges of my roles on committees and outside bodies.
Earlier I talked about the many roles we all face and act in and upon. The old adage "Know yourself" is vital for us all. I reflected after our debate on AI at the Conference that very few of us asked the question: what is our human nature and how is it formed? All intelligence is artificial as it all grew out of the material conditions of existence. We often only see what we want to see and what we are comfortable with. I have very quickly realised that free will is largely a myth. We have the appearance of free will as a means of living. For myself, Zodiacal releasing has revolutionised my thoughts on this matter. Astrology gives us additional lenses to view what will be and what can be. But the question remains: who chooses and when is it chosen?
Cultural Influences and Historical Context
How do we deal with the cultural influences we are not aware of or indeed where they come from? Historically we need to see how all of society affects the astrologer that we are. What are the implications of how conspiracy theories influence us when we do not know where they came from, the historical, cultural and political conditions that they emerged into? What do you know of similarities and treatments of astrology in the Weimar Republic and what happened to astrologers in Nazi Germany? The Covid pandemic and its implications have influenced how we see the world and what coloured glass we see it through. The ascendant sign we carry into the world is the means by which we link cosmos and consciousness. What factors shape that mask or persona that we carry with us, in other words the face that we keep in the jar by the door? We must always ask: who is it for?
Please read the book 'Post Colonial Astrology' by Alice Sparkly Kat when you think about these issues. Who are you in terms of your own social class, your ethnicity and your identity? Would an astrologer or client of another ethnic group experience Venus retrograde in Aries differently in other cultures and situations? Does the championing of Placidus or other house systems reflect our Eurocentric bias or not?
I feel as I write these words that I am seeking to shock or challenge. Perhaps my Mercury ruler exalted in Virgo in the First house is playing games with the planet Mercury in the Ninth house in Taurus. Perhaps the Sun in Aries in the eighth points me to the darker aspects of the silent place.
Astrology cannot be merely seen as part of the new age movement. It crosses ten thousand years of history from the fixed stars to the denizens of the Kuiper belt and Eris. As human consciousness expands and develops, becomes more complex, where does astrology meet the warp and the weave of magic, science and religion that has contained astrology across those hundred centuries?
The paradigms of astrology from Mesopotamian to modern psychological astrology are apt at times to fall into sectarian struggle over both the greater and lesser technical points. But the truth is that if we become aware of astrological multiplicity, we all thrive and progress. In my practice I seek to blend all of the astrologies I have learned and the disciplines studied. My arrogance I seek to challenge but rarely succeed at. I remember at an assessment prior to my Diploma Exam my tutor asked me why I was so fascinated by Hellenistic and Medieval astrology and did not stick to modern psychological astrology. I replied that I am at heart a neo-Pagan classicist living in the modern world. I also remember another tutor warning against the predictive nature and risk of fortune telling. Oddly though, they admitted at another session casting a chart to see why a client had initially consulted them. I couldn't help notice that this came directly in form from the horary astrology after the form of William Lilly.
Knowing Ourselves in Uncertain Times
To understand who we are and how we do astrology requires us to know ourselves from the shadow, through the self and the persona. We must understand who we are politically, culturally, spiritually and socially. Apparently my great aunt read cards on the sea front in North Wales during the 1890s. My grandmother taught me to read the tea leaves when I was eight. I had read my great aunt's books by the time I was ten and my father read me all of the mythologies of Greece and Rome. All of these things have contributed to the roots of my astrology and my Jungian psychotherapy. I have examined all of these influences over the years. All of us are challenged to understand our astrological practice and our social role. It enriches us to look at all these parts of who and what we are.
The ancient world's astrology is as psychological as the medieval world's insights, as indeed is the world of Liz Greene or indeed Jungian psychotherapy. The challenge for all of us is to maintain a non-sectarian, multiple-lensed view of ourselves in all our roles as astrologers in the 21st century. Firmicus Maternus writing in the late Roman period and Rhetorius of Egypt in the crisis-torn Byzantine Empire wrote and practised in times like ours. We can learn much from their works and apply them to the here and now. The challenge to the astrologer now as then is to know and understand who we are collectively and individually. It's not easy but at least we have WiFi and the multiplicities of technology that those earlier transitional ages did not have. We simply need to know ourselves though as much as the astrologers did then.
Let us remember the words of Vettius Valens the last time Neptune was in Aries. After the American Civil War, anti-astrology legislation was introduced in the USA; may this not happen again under Project 2025? "Those who engage in the prediction of the future and the truth, having acquired a soul that is free and not enslaved, do not think highly of Fortune and do not devote themselves to hope, nor are afraid of death, but instead they live their lives expressively in the cause of good, nor become depressed in the case of bad and are content with whatever is present. Those who do not desire the impossible are capable of bearing what is preordained through their own self-mastery and, being estranged from all pleasure and praise, become established as soldiers of fate..."
I leave you finally with the chart of my re-election bid in May 2027 as a member of the Corbyn Sultana party.
Martyn Shrewsbury is a Jungian therapist, newly qualified astrologer and an elected councillor of a left-wing persuasion in Ystradgynlais, South Wales. Interestingly, it leaves him in the unusual position of being both a councillor and a counsellor.
