I remembered back to a post I had done a while back when I went to astrology.com and got my “chart” done for like $9.99. A 19-page report came with it, all of it so specifically accurate it was spooky. Well, since then, I’ve been noticing things like my supervisor for my morning “homeland security” job, as my father likes to refer to it, reminding me constantly of my “Aries” qualities (he’s quite fond of Astrology), and most of them make a lot of sense. So last night, as I celebrated with birthday cake and ice cream, I borrowed an old coffee table book of Astrology from my housemate last night and looked into it some more.
I found out that there is the sign everyone knows about, roughly correlated to your month of birth, known as your “Sun” sign. Then, there is a lesser known “Moon” sign, that is a secondary characteristic. I am a Taurus moon sign, which explains why people often describe me as “balanced,” as their characteristics are somewhat opposing. There are something like 12 different “Houses” that the different planets can affect, and each house describes certain aspects of your life. The analogy given was like a vintage of a grape – you can tell how good a wine is (or guess what its characteristics are without drinking it) by knowing the date the grape was “born.”
I also learned that the art of reading the planetary alignment at the time of one’s birth is an art & science that has been around for thousands of years, and the current form is a kind of synergy that happened around the 1400’s, combining Astrological data and observations from all Asian and East-Asian cultures (and probably more, I didn’t read very deeply).
Anyway, I also liked the references to Carl Jung in the Astrology book. Jung and I share the idea that traditions like religion, Yoga, Astrology, Music, and Art forms like mandalas continue to exist because they each touch on some universal truth that is primarily intuitive. I suppose Art and Music even more so than the more tangible things like Astrology and Yoga, which seem more science-based, being developed on thousands of years of observations of internal and external objects and phenomenon.
I’m going to try not to drive anyone in my life crazy with my newfound passion for Astrology, but it’s hard to contain my enthusiasm sometimes! I asked all my immediate family members for their Birth location, Date, and Time of Birth, the 3 crucial factors in an Astrology chart. Fun for me!
