Traditional Astrology in the Modern World
“The stars in the heavens sing a music, if only we had ears to hear”
-Pythagoras
Many of you may have had an introduction to modern astrology through sun sign columns or magazine horoscopes, but let me tell you that this couldn’t be further from what lies at the heart of the astrological tradition.
In ancient times, astrology was never just a party trick or social ruse. Astrology was commonly understood throughout the ages to be the mechanism through which Divinity expressed itself to us, within us & through us, by our interaction with the sky. Natal astrology, as has been so popularized in recent years, lets us look into the universe’s code for the birth of a unique person, but casting horoscopes can serve much more than just analyzing the birth of a human. As ancient astrologer-priests in Egyptian temples and astronomer-philosophers in Greek observatories laid out complex and intricate systems of instructions to decode the horoscope, more and more techniques seemed to pop out of the woodwork as tools for us to use down here on Earth. I will discuss some of these other powerful uses of astrology below.
Astrology was & is reviving itself as the great celestial art, and its study encompassed many different branches across history. What are these branches and how can we integrate these techniques into our lives in the modern world to reconnect ourselves to the cosmos? Take a read ahead to discover how we can unlock more layers of our conscious connection to the cosmos, by harmonizing more deeply with the rhythms of the planets.
It is important to consider that everything has a birth chart. Nature is continually birthing new life, new ideas, new creations, and new opportunities with every tick of the cosmic clock. With that in mind, we can broaden our scope of how astrology can be applied to assist us in our lives.
Electional astrology was traditionally used to find an inception chart or an auspicious times to secure a positive outcome of events. For the ancients, this meant electing charts for establishing victories in war, having successful journeys at sea, winning office and public favor, and much more. Most things that don’t end up successfully, end up so because they didn’t have the best inceptional chart. Today, astrologers help clients find the best electional chart possible within a given timeframe to gain the support of the stars in their endeavors. Astrologers elect charts for businesses, medical operations, weddings, royal coronations, treaty signings, first dates and much more.
Medical astrology can assess the nature of someone’s illness, and discovers its treatment. Both the inception chart of an illness (known as a decumbiture chart) or a medical horary chart can identify the origin, strength, length & severity of any illness. Hippocrates himself, to whom all modern doctors swear the Hippocratic oath, said about astrology, “A physician without a knowledge of astrology has no right to call himself a physician“. Pretty strong words coming from the so-called father of medicine. Modern medical astrologers integrate other holistic practices like Western Vitalist Herbalism, Traditional Chinese Medicine or Ayurveda to name a few, in order to help assess & treat illnesses diagnosed from an astrological inquiry.
Mundane Astrology is the astrology of the world. It tracks when the planets, aspects, ingresses, eclipses, lunations and more occur throughout the year to forecast the current events and astrological influences upon the greater scale of humanity as a collective. Using outer planet cycles, Aries Ingress Charts, Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions, Saros & Metonic cycles of Eclipses, and more- all lend their hand into studying how the thread of fate extends itself across time and continents.
Financial astrology is another realm of astrology that is used to analyze global and domestic markets and financial trends, because everything truly happens in cycles. Since medieval times, astrologers would cast annual & monthly horoscopes to track the upward & downward trends in the value of goods and commodities. Naturally, we can observe the topic of one’s financials in a natal chart, but on a larger scale, astrologers also use planetary cycles to analyze trends in the stock market and especially as has been growing in popularity for predicting trends of digital cryptocurrencies, one of the best frontiers in terms of proof of astrological correlations.
Horary astrology has also been used as a divinatory art, and upon the moment of asking an astrologer a question, the current positions of the planets will provide the key to answering the question. It’s almost like a tarot reading but instead, casting a horoscope. Horary questions can range from anything like “where is my phone?“, to “do they really love me?“. Being able to read a chart on a whim is really useful for getting quick answers to questions like these!
And so, the alignments of the planets laid over the backdrop of the zodiac is truly the mechanism of the clockwork behind the cosmos and its sentient beings. But this knowledge was lost. The wisdom of the stars, our most ancient system of knowledge has been oppressed, driven underground, and persecuted. But now, here we are, and the lost light is finally returning to illuminate the body of knowledge that can bring us closer to wholeness as a humanity.
As we can see, astrology has so much to offer us, and every day we are discovering more ways we can reconnect with the harmony around us. For the music of the spheres will continue to play, but like Pythagoras tells us, those who have the ears to hear the music, will know how beautiful the harmony really is.
