[expanded 2/18/2025]
This is going to be a less technical post than my usual. I wanted to discuss the capabilities and limitations in our capacity to read charts. In my years as an astrologer, I've encountered a lot of misinformation and unrealistic expectations about what astrologers can and can't see in a chart. I'm hoping this post will be informative to both beginning students and to clients who intend to consult with an astrologer one day.
Astrology is not a Form of ESP
When I was a young consultant, I used to let my clients know that I was not a psychic. On one of these occasions, my client retorted angrily: "But I am!". His tone took me aback, because I wasn't trying to cast any aspersions on psychics. I come from a family of mediums on my mother's side and have often compared astrological notes with family members who do possess psychic gifts. What I was merely trying to communicate, was the fact that I personally didn't possess these gifts; whatever I was reading in the charts, came from the charts themselves. I felt this was important to clarify this fact, because the two processes of obtaining information and the type of information obtained, are quite different. But despite my attempts at explaining this, I still have a close friend who insists that this is not true and that I'm "tapping into" something outside of the charts. She's mistaken about me. But she's not mistaken about all astrologers. There certainly ARE astrologers who possess extrasensory and/or channeling abilities. But that's a different skillset and it's not a requirement to do good astrology. This conflation of psychic abilities with astrology, comes from popular culture and from the fact that astrology and what astrologers actually do, is not well understood by many in mainstream media or by those who haven't studied it. For example, we still see precession being brought up as a phenomenon that we astrologers are supposedly ignorant about. If astrology were an academic discipline -- as it was in antiquity -- there wouldn't be as much mystification and misinformation around it.
Astrology is a language made up of symbols and rules, like many other languages. But unlike other languages, our symbols come from the names of astronomical bodies and asterisms. Nothing wrong with that. One can communicate with pretty much anything as a symbol, as long as there is meaning attached to it. But astrology is predicated upon a belief that what happens in the cosmos has a mirrored effect upon what happens on the earth. This is a very ancient postulate, but it's one that many outside of astrology have trouble accepting. Yet for those of us who have accepted it, it's theoretically possible to "READ" what's written in the sky as an indication of the changes on earth. It looks mystical to many because we don't really understand the process by which this axiom becomes true, nor do we FULLY understand the language itself. Any language system -- whether that be mathematics or chemistry or hieroglyphics -- may look like magic, if we don't know anything about it. This scene from Game of Thrones comes to mind:
Samwell Tarly: I read about it in a very old book.
Gilly: You know all that from staring at marks on paper?
Samwell Tarly: Yes.
Gilly: You're like....a wizard!
Astrology rests on natural law and linguistics. Those who do have access to wizard-like means of acquiring information, might certainly use those. But for those of us who don't, we just need to work more intently at deciphering and better translating the lingua cosmica.
Modern Astrology Reads like a Haiku
Any linguist will tell you that to decipher meaning, the first thing a symbol requires is a context. The chart itself can provide a context for our language. For example, if we know a chart is for the birth of a person, the symbols will have a different interpretation than it might if the chart were for the birth of a goat. But even if we have the birth moment as our context for the symbols, it doesn't mean everything IN that communication is necessarily about that entity. If I see the word "chicken" in a poster about Kentucky Fried Chicken, it doesn't mean that the company itself is behaving like a chicken. There is lots of cultural context that tells me that the chickens are an important object of the company's work, not the company itself. We need cultural context to interpret that word properly in that communication. But in most popular astrology, we assume everything IN the chart is describing the person to whom that chart "belongs". We conflate subjects, objects, and even predicates. Every symbol is currently being interpreted as some aspect of a person's personality, when it wasn't originally intended for that purpose. But why do we do this and is there some merit to doing it?
In most prose, you need symbols that convey meaning through words, and you need rules and structures that organize those words into longer communications that are not ambiguous. Those rules are called grammar and those structures are called syntax. Astrology has symbols made up of planets and signs (there are others, but we can keep it simple here). They're arranged in a circle (or square) with 12 segments. These symbols and segments signify keywords that provide many meanings (just like many words in English and other languages). These keywords create impressions and associations. But that's about it. We don't really have grammatical rules or syntax to tell us how those impressions are related to each other. Without those structures, the communication we extract is very ambiguous in terms of external change because you cannot distinguish between subjects, objects or about whom or what we are predicating.
But since we have a context (the native in natal astrology) we can internalize those keywords and make everything be about an internal and often perennial state of being that characterizes that person. In those cases, the birth chart reading becomes a communication about an impressionistic state of being. Like a haiku, we get an image of feelings or a sense-impression of states of being, during moments in time (when we time the activations of the chart).
But is that a problem? Not really. It can be very therapeutic to get confirmation that the universe "knows" exactly how you're feeling at any given moment. It's like a cosmic parent telling you that they empathize and understand where you're coming from. Really deep psychological work can come from these internal dynamics. These impressions express the formal cause that we're trying to understand about ourselves and they should be the end-goal of an astrological consultation. But they have limitations and drawbacks that we should be aware of. The first is that an over-dentification with the chart as US, can be quite detrimental to our creative process. We are not "our charts". We have imprinted upon the moment of our birth because of archetypal experiences in our lives that resembled the chart. And our whole life is about understanding those imprints. The second limitation to the haiku approach is that we can't make accurate predictions about the outer world from sense impressions that rest solely on symbolic keywords. It would be like attempting to communicate with a language that you learned solely from a dictionary.
Prediction within Parameters
Astrologers get a lot of flack for being unreliable at predicting events. Most of it is warranted. We're trying to read communications without knowing that we're handicapped by an incomplete understanding of our language. To be fair, there are many astrologers who refrain from predictions altogether and stick to the haiku approach of reading charts (what I call inner world astrology) because -- let's face it -- that's ultimately where the real spiritual value is. But there's also a place for understanding changes in the outer world and the outcomes that they will likely engender. In this approach, the context of the birth chart is not the individual's inner states, but rather his outer LIFE. In order to do what I call outer world astrology, knowing the missing grammar and syntax of the language is a requirement. Some rules are available in the tradition, but the linguistic ones are not. But aside from the linguistic limitations, there are also limitations inherent in the communications themselves.
This topic of prediction in astrology is what I've spent the better part of my adulthood trying to understand. So I'll try to explain as best as I can, in as concise a manner as possible (for those who've stuck with me this far). First, astrology does have the capacity to communicate concrete, outer-world changes that are not vague. But astrologers are limited in their interpretations by 1) what appears to be the creative aspect of light, and 2) by the current state of linguistic understanding of the astrologer. Make no mistake, existence is dependent upon logos (i.e. word, language, reason).
I'll try to untangle the first limitation, which has to do with free will. All change is a creative process. Even if it doesn't look like that to us. All change starts with an idea (Gk. eidos). In order to create a thing, one must first 'see' it in the mind. This seeing requires light. But the light I'm talking about is not optical, it's the light of consciousness; the one that allows a person, whose blind from birth, to create mental images based upon their sense-experiences with reality. They don't have the same visual images that a seeing person does. But they have the same needs and capacities (the universal ideas or archetypes) that we do. These needs and capacities (planets and signs) will color their sense-impressions through those experiences. This is true for all of us. So the very act of living creates sense-impressions that are unique to each individual. These mental images will then seek a material vehicle that can give them shape and through which they can express. Since the resources available to each of us are different, we'll produce different creations or changes. That's the creative aspect of light. As long as there's light, there's free will (the selective process). And as long as there is free will, the specific routes we express through, will be unique.
[...by the way, if you live in a society where uniqueness and creativity are being diminished in favor of uniformity, efficiency, and productivity, that is a sign that light is giving way to darkness.]
So the first limitation to prediction resides in the metaphysical nature of change itself. But the second limitation comes from our current level of linguistic knowledge. Most of us don't REALLY understand what the language of the chart is capable of telling us. We make all sorts of assumptions about the limitations of our astrology without really examining the language. I can say categorically that our linguistic limitations are categorical. (Ha! That is more true than you know.) What I mean is that it's not the idea part of the change (the part that comes through light), that's hard to interpret in the chart. Or to put it more grammatically, the verbal part of the creative process is rather easy to read. It's the material side of the creative process that's hard for us to discern.
The reason for this is because every existing life already has a storehouse of resources in it that comes from prior choices and from family and social legacy. But as astrologers, the language in the chart only tells us which category those resources belong to. Without knowing some background about a person's life, we don't always have access to that storehouse. It's a bit like trying to predict not only what's in a person's computer folder labeled: "Fun things", but also which one of those "fun things" they will select to engage with.
Astrology is a higher order language. It has to be because the specific nouns that exist throughout time are always changing. For example, in antiquity, society used to store more instances of "those in exile" in "the folder" labeled 12th house. Nowadays, this isn't as much the case. However, now we have other things --- such as the internet -- that fit the category of the 12th house. But to know which "item" a client has available in that folder, we often have to interpret from context. The greater the context, the better we can anticipate that choice and predict accurately. It's definitely easier to read our own charts, when we understand the language and its rules. But even then, there are times when we ourselves end up stumbling upon new solutions that are hard to imagine for ourselves. For example, many times I saw my birth chart point to a career in construction. I'm a small woman with no martial skills and a lack of interest in construction. Yet, in my 40s I ended up remodeling houses. Where did the will to take that path come from? A creative solution to a problem. The greater the light, the more paths you can see.
Are there ways to improve our predictive methods? Absolutely. Currently there's lots of room for improvement in our understanding of the chart language that will allow for better outer world predictions. But will we ever reach the point where we can exactly predict everything in a person's life? I doubt it. Despite what Stoics believed to be the case, not only does the language of astrology appear to indicate that there's room for diversity in creation, but creation itself seems to illustrate this.
Retrospective Analyses
When presenting or teaching an astrological concept to students -- usually about how the planets express -- astrologers will use an example from history or from a person's life that illustrates their point. For example: in mundane astrology, some might say the Uranus/Neptune sextile has to do with unusual spiritual beliefs. We'll then proceed to look for evidence of unusual spiritual beliefs occurring the last time these two planets formed a sextile (this was in the 1980s). This is called a retrospective analysis and there is nothing wrong with doing this. As teachers, we need to illustrate for students what the expressions of the two planets might look like in real life. However, this should not be taken as any sort of evidence that this IS how the two planets will express every time they form a sextile. In other words, a retrospective case study does not constitute any sort of evidence of a larger pattern of external expression. The same is true for a delineation of that configuration -- or any other -- in a person's chart. Case studies are not pattern analyses or correlations. They are merely hypothesis that can be put to the test as predictions. An archetype will express in many different outer world expressions, which change depending upon the necessities of the times.
Planets by themselves are merely the dynamic force of their outer world expressions, not their material vehicles. As stated above, the outer world expression of an archetype depends upon the matter (Gk. hyle) that is at hand. This changes with history, much in the same way that the resources available in our lives changes with time. If I want to bake a chocolate cake, but I don't have cocoa in my house today, and the store is closed, I will have to bake a different kind of cake or wait until the store is open 3 days from now. But in 3 days, I may no longer desire to eat chocolate cake. So in the future, even if the matter becomes available, the idea (Gk. eidos) may have passed. All creation is idea interacting with matter.
Besides illustrating known examples to students, a retrospective analysis of a chart can also be helpful after an event or situation has manifested that is not well understood. For example, in cases of unsolved crimes or disappearances. We do this with horary all of the time, where we locate the relevant figures in the chart and attempt to see the unfolding of the situation asked about. But we can do the exact same thing with natal charts as well. Our first example of how to do this is available on our Youtube channel.
So astrology is more than just vocabulary and blended keywords. Keywords convey the content or meaning of what we communicate. But how do these expressions come to be what they are? And how does the language convey that process? That is something serious astrologers are just now beginning to examine.