Hudson Valley Astrologer

1 Corinthians 15:41 (NIV) “The sun has one kind of splendor, the moon another and the stars another; and star differs from star in splendor.” ^1.

I was in church the first time it happened, while the congregation was reciting prayers together from a little black book. The books were kept in a small wooden slit on the back of the pew in front of us. Parishioners simply reached out, pulled the books from their place, opened the page listed on the bulletin and began reading aloud. But my book got stuck and wouldn’t come loose. I wasn’t able to read or pray because I literally found myself in a tussle with the scripture, apropos for the niggling curiosity growing inside of me that increasingly wondered whether the stories written down thousands of years ago were true or not.

Psalm 8:3 (NIV): “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place…”^2.

What was I missing? What did the congregation get out of reciting this incomprehensible muddle? All I remember from church was a never-ending diet of drone. A staleness. A stoic godlessness that hung in the air, as if the attending priest mixed far too little Frankincense into the blend of incents, and so there was no lift for the spirit, overpowered as it were by the Myrrh. I could almost see the competing prayers, fighting like mad for ascension, but being suffocated in the fume and falling back into the dank musty mess of things — the humdrum dysfunction of ordinary family life. A rhythmic ringing of metal on metal reached my tin ears, as the gold thurible, or censer, struck a gold metal chain with each successive swing of the priest’s arm. A motion which was meant to reverently spread the smoke and pay homage. But to me the metallic clinking was reminiscent of a tin cup on the bars of a jail cell; the prisoner living in desperation, caught inside of a monotonous life, and losing all hope for release. The dull sound of the golden metronome played on, surrounded by a gathering smoke, but it was like keeping time in a fog where the driver struggles to stay awake much less pay attention. There was little room for the prayers to breathe. Heavy with doubt, they struggled for “escape velocity,” never mind reaching heaven. Instead a bittersweet sense just lingered, like all the suffering and hardship in the world, which the smoke from the Myrrh is said to represent. But like some songs you just can’t get out of your head, Psalm 23 for example, my nostrils filled from an endless stream of gray peppery clouds that burned the back of my throat, forcing a coughing fit. The songs playing over and over again in my mind, like harsh words from “Our Father,” who like your own father may have ridiculed you, or words from mother that confused you, and were difficult to understand, especially because her words were mostly quoted from the little black book. Psalm 23 remember is the one that begins with “The Lord is my Shepard; I shall not want,” and it plays on and on in the minds of the faithful all of whom are trying to get ahead in the world.

Before digital music, listeners would cue up vinyl discs on a record player, but the tip of the needle sometimes got hung up on the worn out vinyl, and the needle would get trapped in a scratch, a groove that ran too deep. The point would “skip” back on itself, rehearsing and rehashing the same old material. Analogous perhaps to many religions, replaying an ancient record, wearing out the same old songs for thousands of years. The old phonograph example is a physical phenomenon, a relic, not unlike any of today’s revival movements intent on playing only a small portion of a record, over and over, again and again, like religion.

Psalm 19:1 (NIV): “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” ^3.

Sometimes memories like these stay with a person. There was another time that I questioned my faith when I lost my kite to the Wind Spirit, and fervently prayed, beseeching this version of god to release my kite. A mammoth sized willow tree, with teardrop leaves, snagged my kite at the very moment I thought she was about to clear the treetops and reach for the sky. Being the desperate little altar boy I was, I did the only thing I could do in that situation, I prayed, and I prayed, with the utmost sincerity and faith. In the end, all I had to show for my efforts was childish grief that discolored my face like the Pieta or any of the other scenes of lamentation from the great stained windows of the world. But ever hopeful that the wind would carry my kite back to me, I prayed some more.

However, this was not to be my Yogananda moment.⁴ That time was yet to come, when I would learn more about the Yogi who introduced eastern philosophies and practices to the West. Instead of Yogananda my eldest brother happened by, laughing hysterically at my childish behavior and belief in a silly kite of all things. He caught me in the act of wailing, a sincere, heartfelt song to the kite, unaware, and bawling beneath the willow. He came into view unexpectedly, just as the weeping willow had snared my kite without warning. Entangled with emotion, between faith and reason, I felt completely exposed and vulnerable, eclipsed in a sense. The kite in fact had blocked the Sun, and I was standing in its shadow.

I was relegated to singing a morose song of self-pity for my loss, hoping for redemption the way “they” do in church, but my lament was more a tribute song to the King of Pain, a personal dethronement, losing my crown, and feeling powerless among the greater forces of Nature. Although my song was about a kite, and not “a black hat caught in a high tree top.”

For the King, the hat represents his higher thoughts, but the ideas are perhaps obscured somehow, darkened by incomprehensible rumination and concepts out of reach, or unattainable. For me the kite was more simply a loss of joy, my carefree optimism, sense of freedom and possibility, became entrapped on high by the limitation of an unhelpful emotional response, i.e. weeping. A conflict perhaps between the vital center of youth and the intellectual center of adolescence, of being and becoming as it were. “Where,” I wondered upon reflection, “is the good fortune and luck this kite pattern is supposed to represent?” When “the wind won’t stop,” when our thinking is constantly focused on “what is lacking,” lost, or out of reach, resentment builds. The dream becomes snared in limitation, anchored in hopelessness, a kind of thinking that is at the root of all suffering. Hence, The King of Pain. In the version of the song by The Police, the lyrics continue, “I’ve seen this before inside the pouring rain.” Sting wrote. Alluding once again to the limitations of the mental-emotional connections within us all. But I didn’t really understand the words when I first heard them. I just liked the song and sang along, the way we all did in church. My own rendition of the song was a plea, an aching really, for my prayers to be heard. There was no correspondence in my young mind that the kite as a symbol represented an ability to soar and reach the highest heights, to not just ‘think’ about higher levels of existence, to not just command an understanding with pure reason, but to intuit something more, something beyond mere logic. No, the tree snagged more than an idea, not just a hat, but a beautiful kite in all its colorful splendor. Moving forward, how fulfillment and self-realization might be attained with “her wings” caught up in a tangle, knotted in the tree, was anybody’s guess.

Psalm 136:9 (NIV): “the moon and stars to govern the night; His love endures forever.”^5.

What did I know? The gales prevailed, and my prayers went unheard above the din, the wind whipped through the willow making the long lashes scream, the way a lover does when she first learns of the betrayal by her betrothed. My supplications were silenced, unanswered. Then the thought crossed my mind that those thin tree lashes might serve as nice whips. The wind god might lend a young boy 40 lashes for his misbehavior. No, make it 40 days and 40 nights of lashes for his sinfulness, for losing faith. Or, perhaps the boy is more deserving of an unlimited flogging, in keeping with the Romanesque custom of impaling their favorite son, like my kite, to a tree for his ‘sinfulness,’. Surely, I had done something wrong, but what? Slowly, I walked home with my hands in my pockets, my head bowed, and fully ashamed of myself for having thought such miracles were even possible. Then the wind kicked up in a squall and knocked my hat off sending it tumbling, and me racing after it still holding onto the string that once secured my kite, but in this instance the string was simply useless, no longer in control of the movement of my kite let alone controlling the movement of my hat. I had my doubts about such things, what grownups call faith, belief with no strings attached. But I must have also harbored some guilt about it all, for not believing anymore. For not wanting to be ridiculed. For being so childish. I imagined at the time that all my thoughts could be read as easily as a scroll of words running across the jumbotron during a big game for all the world to see. Thinking better of it I decided to keep this reverie to myself, and try NOT to think about it, NOT put my thoughts on display, NOT, at least until I knew better.

Psalm 147:4 (NIV): “He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name.”^6.

Fast forward to a day in the life today, and the tables have turned. My eldest brother, along with most of my family and friends, believe in one form or another of the wind god, but not Anemoi or Vayu, instead their faith is born of a variation of one of the three Abrahamic religions (it matters not which one), whose hero vicariously comes to our rescue now and again and provides us some kind of comfort or release from the sadness and grief that has gotten us all in a snag, caught up in our own Tree of Life, our own Weeping Willow. Nevertheless, religion seems to ‘work’ for a great many people, and all the more when life looks hopeless, or if there is “a little black spot on the Sun today.” Apparently, people do not need a Total Solar Eclipse to pique their fears and anxieties.

Initially, like many others, and possibly you, I approached the reveries of astrology with skepticism. Perhaps stemming from my childhood curiosity in church, wondering if preordained narratives, like scripture, could truly hold the answers to life’s complexities, or if the “subtle realms” that I later learned about in the Yogananda anecdote were real.^4. Astrology, with its celestial maps and zodiacal signs, promised explanations for some of these uncertainties. There’s no denying the appeal – the idea that the vast cosmos might hold a personalized message, a code waiting to be cracked, a key to unlocking our purpose and transcending the ordinary; a script for all the world to see; messages sent to earth scrolling across the big jumbotron in the sky. However, scientific evidence to support these claims is sparse and so it appears that many adherents, like those who follow religious edicts, take it on faith that the drama of the planets in the sky mirrors the drama being lived on earth. But astrology certainly is not about belief. It’s more about philosophy and probabilities. The great spiritual philosopher, Sri Aurobindo, goes further. He envisioned a framework beyond probability. The Absolute, or what he called a “synthetic reinterpretation by which the law of that wider existence may be represented in a new order of truths.” As it turns out the Zodiac provides the framework upon which this “new order of truths” sits.

While correspondences between astrological phenomena and life can be extremely precise, the usual timing and manifestation of events operate along a wide spectrum of possibility. Like the tools used in predicting the weather, astrological calculations have gotten to be quite accurate with the advent of modern computing [see John von Neumann], but we are still a long way off from predicting where every snowflake might fall. A key limitation in weather prediction is the sensitivity of systems to initial conditions (the “Butterfly Effect”). Respecting this phenomenon in astrological analysis makes logical sense. Some astrologers however, practice what amounts to making childish appeals, to Anemoi or Vayu, but like my own experience beneath the willow tree, I’ve observed these practitioners to be full of wind and not much else. My practice errs on the side of a humility, a version of astrology that respects the Indeterminate within the realm of probability, and of not knowing everything. But not discounting something Paramahansa fully embraced, a touch of heart. Another aspect of my work that differentiates me from other practitioners is how I strive to know where I am on the wheel, that is, The Gnostic Circle.^8. What draws me to this framework is the idea that it is more important to understand where Astrology is going, not where it has been. So, Thea’s “synthetic reinterpretation” of the zodiac is always running in the background and my essays on her book The Magical Carousel will help readers understand an altogether new paradigm for understanding this “synthetic reinterpretation.”

Within this framework I cannot honestly be certain what a particular astrological measurement might mean for any one individual, not the least of which is an eclipse on your Sun, or Moon. Someday it would be nice to approach an Eclipse, or Mercury Retrograde without the fanfare of “breaking news” promoting and sensationalizing the event, but we aren’t there yet. Instead I invite readers, within the sacred space of a consultation, to experience the remarkable revelations that can unfold, and to appreciate that when this happens it’s not just the astrologer, the client, or the miracle of astrology alone per se. More often than not it is a synthesis of all these things together, and something else, a certain je ne sais quoi, or what William Burroughs called the “nectar of the firmament,” which intervenes.

The goal of a consultation is not just to help you attain a better understanding of yourself, guided by the stars, but to help you better understand your understanding. My sincerest wish is to help clients reclaim ownership of their Crown, which more than likely was not lost due to some external happening, family dysfunction, or trauma, but was relinquished through a lack of understanding, an inner turmoil of the planets within.  After a brief period of solitude and withdrawal, I know that I am emerging from my own private eclosion, bursting forth from the chrysalis with new insight, and vigor, ready to book a session with you, and with my kite in hand.

1. 1 Corinthians 15:41 (NIV). (n.d.). Bible Gateway. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians%2015%3A41&version=NIV
2. Psalm 8:3 (NIV). (n.d.). Bible Gateway. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%208%3A3&version=NIV
3. Psalm 19:1 – The heavens declare the glory of God. (n.d.). Bible Hub. https://biblehub.com/psalms/19-1.htm
4. Autobiography of a Yogi “As I approached the kite, I noticed a string trailing from it. I followed the string, and to my astonishment, it led me to a hidden cave. Inside the cave, I discovered a wise sage meditating. He looked at me with kind eyes and said, ‘Young one, your sister’s kite has flown far beyond the physical realm. It now soars in the subtle ether, connecting the earthly and spiritual planes. Retrieve it not with your hands, but with your heart.”
5. Psalm 136:9 – Bible Gateway. (n.d.). https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/Psalm%20136%3A9
6. Psalm 147:4 (NIV). (n.d.). Bible Gateway. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%20147:4&version=NIV
7. Maitra, S. K., & Aurobindo, S. (1942). The life Divine. http://aurobindo.ru/workings/sa/18-19/the_life_divine_21-22_e.pdf
8. Norelli-Bachelet, Patrizia (1973) The Gnostic Circle: A Synthesis in the Harmonies of the Cosmos