What is astrology?

We human beings, in our history, have collected a set of perceptions of what we call reality, which we have organised into systems and disciplines. These disciplines study particular fragments of reality, usually in the form of the relationship between a subject and an object. This premise is not always explicit in how we interpret the world around us and how we interact with it. But the concealment of this very modern presupposition conditions the forms of experience we have of the natural world and of what we call living beings. Is it possible to think of a more subtle form of consciousness than the anthropomorphic images we have? Can we think of a cosmos that is alive, conscious and wonderfully full of meaning and life?

The premise guiding astrology in this arrangement of things is that the order of celestial phenomena has a mysterious relationship to the order of terrestrial phenomena: as above, so below. In our history, we human beings have perceived this relationship in different ways depending on the cultural and spatio-temporal context in which we found ourselves. There is no astrology detached from its Zeitgeist, from its historical conditions and conditioning, from its archetypal cultural images, its fears, its limitations, its material conditions and its location in the gigantic dialectical spiral we call History. Therefore, what we call astrology as an accumulation of knowledge is rather the accumulation of epochally conditioned perceptions of a certain mystery. The form of this mystery is the particular perception that phenomena in the sky in the solar system coincide in structure, temporal development and content with phenomena occurring on Earth.

The planetary movements are somehow essentially linked with the fabric of our little lives. Not only this, but also the fact that events unfolding outwardly in our lives seem to correspond to inner states is another mystery for which we have only provisional metaphors. These perceptions that reflect the above with the below, the macro with the micro and the inside with the outside, have always been a fact of human history. The dynamics by which we relate to this fact has always been linked to the cultural attitudes of a given society towards this mystery. The use of certain metaphors and images, rejection, uncritical acceptance, trivialisation, etc. are all possible attitudes that human beings have displayed throughout history. However, it is clear that there have always been humans who have dedicated their lives to investigate this mystery not only intellectually but as a personal destiny and way of life.

In a narrow sense, we could think of astrology as the discipline that has created a language for understanding the relationship between celestial and terrestrial phenomena at the level of meaning. In this sense, the sky seems to be a representation of what goes on in our intimate lives. Thus, the structure of what we call the cosmos seems to reflect the structure of the self that questions itself. In other words, the solar system seems to reflect the system that we are.

This language arises from and is intertwined with a fundamental astonishment: the subject is not separated from the object. In fact, the presentation of astrology in these objective terms already evidences an initial deformation that generally conditions access to this discipline. In any case, astrological language invites us to think about a reality that is much more mysterious and interconnected than we usually think and unleashes questions that are not to be immediately answered. Are the planets a representation of dimensions that all inhabit together in our physical reality on Earth? What is time? And what is space? Are space and time empty, inert containers for our experience or do they have qualities? What is the relationship between inner emotional states and the outer events that reflect them? These questions and many more open up like a flower when we become interested in this language that is so old and yet so new each time, as if in studying astrology we are not learning anything new but discovering in layers, ceaselessly, the mystery that surrounds us and the mystery that we are.

There is yet another possible framing for what we call astrology that strains the very word we refer to. In this frame we can speak of a discipline for which the essential is not the sky, or the planets, or their movements. Maybe we can speak of astrology as metaphysics, as the structure of this world in which we live and as, profoundly, the structure of this being that we are. Are we beings of the same nature as the world around us? Or is there something else? Are we something else? Or are we something less, an empty space out of which the world emerges as an order, a cosmos? Perhaps astrology speaks of the structure of this order. It could be speaking in a language other than representation, and perhaps this poetic language is a way of living a life with more wonder and depth.