Earned Wisdom

Introduction

Age is opportunity no less, Than youth itself, though in another dress. And as the evening twilight fades away, The sky is filled with stars invisible by day. —H.W. Longfellow, Morituri Salutamus In the twenty-first century, more and more of us are living for decades past sixty. We are redefining “old age,” finding ways to remain active in our communities and seeking a new role for ourselves. This transition—becoming an elder—can be just as daunting as every other major life transition (childhood to adolescence, adolescence to young adult, young adult to mature adult, and now, mature adult to elder). We need to use all the navigational tools we can gather, and seek out those who have successfully made the transition before us. For thirty-five years I have been a counselor, teacher and writer on astrology. It has informed my way of seeing the world, and its gifts have been many and varied. The sole drawback to being an astrologer has been that many people don’t know enough about this discipline. There is a general lack of understanding about the practical ways in which astrology can help to navigate life, especially during times of change, whether internal (such as a life transition) or external (such as a chaotic political and economic climate). In my own sixtieth year, I have written this book to serve as a guide for those on the journey to becoming an elder, and those looking back and trying to better understand the changes they have lived through. Astrology offers wisdom and insight into the human condition, developed over thousands of years. It is a language of symbols as ancient as the first person who ever noticed a connection between the waxing and waning Moon and the behavior of humans, plants and animals. In his thought-provoking book on human evolution, Sex, Time and Power, Leonard Shlain speaks of what it must have been like to be among the first people to make the connection between the cycle of the Moon and the cycle of women. This may have been the first symbolic thought.(1) Certainly it was the first major astrological thought. The ability to relate that which is above to that which is below allows us to understand ourselves as part of the universe instead of apart from it. The ability to see ourselves reflected in nature encourages us to feel the connection between our inner reality and the outer one. As we say in astrology: “As above, so below.” From these ancient beginnings, astrology has evolved into a language of archetypes. As Richard Tarnas wrote in Cosmos and Psyche, archetypes can be seen as “autonomous patterns of meaning that inform both psyche and matter, providing a bridge between inner and outer.”(2) In my imagination, at the dawn of creation—the Big Bang, as we now understand it—patterns or archetypes as well as material forms manifested with the explosion. These patterns inform existence. They are invisible to the human eye because they are pure energy. They seem to permeate everything. Each and every person as well as everything in nature is a manifestation of these archetypal patterns. It is said that you cannot look upon the face of God and live. If you think of God as the ultimate archetype, the One that encompasses the All, the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, it makes sense that it would be impossible to see God through the lens of the physical body the very essence of which is to experience yourself as separate. What we, the living, the manifest, see is that which is manifest. The way we approach the archetypal world is through myth. Max Müller, the nineteenth-century German scholar who created the discipline of comparative religion, wrote: Mythology is inevitable, it is natural, it is an inherent necessity of language, if we recognize in language the outward form and manifestation of thought; it is in fact the dark shadow which language throws upon thought, and which can never disappear … Depend upon it, there is mythology now as there was in the time of Homer, only we do not perceive it.(3) The most effective way to approach archetypal patterns is through myth and metaphor. Joseph Campbell, the great twentieth-century scholar of myth and religion, once said: “It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.”(4) The “inexhaustible energies of the cosmos” are the archetypal patterns that inform the manifest world. Myth is the metaphor through which we can understand how archetypal principles work at any given time in history. Astrology speaks to us through myth and metaphor and enables us to understand the nature of things that work under the radar of our rational minds. As a practicing astrologer for more than three decades, I have found the symbolic language of astrology to be an incredible help in navigating my own life as well as the lives of my clients. In particular, I have found in the discipline of astrology an exceptional language for framing all manner of transitions. In school we were taught the difference between a sign and a symbol: a sign is something you look at, a symbol is something you look through. Oddly enough, the twelve primary symbolic constructs of astrology are called signs (Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces). Nonetheless they function as symbols, and by looking through them we can see worlds upon worlds of meaning. We live in times of chaos and change. Leaders come and go; the economy is in tatters. It has become more difficult to understand this chaotic world in the pure light of reason. We find ourselves in need of analogy and metaphor to help us see who we are in the swirling onslaught of too much information. Symbols and the meaning they can reveal to us become necessary in times of change.