“In Angles They Will Pursue Thee” — Angles Speak Louder Than Curves
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I just came across the following quote (attributed to The Emerald Tablets of Thoth by Taoist author Ethan Indigo Smith) that brought me back to the subject of predictive vs psychological (or humanistic) astrology.
“Know ye, the hounds of the Barrier move only through angles and never through curves of space. Only by moving through curves can ye escape them, for in angles they will pursue thee.”
When I took up astrology around 1970, shortly after the advent of the New Age, the theory of synchronicity promoted by Carl Gustav Jung was at the forefront of almost every advance in the art of modern horoscopy. This was evident in the United States, where the mid-century Jungian works of astrologers Dane Rudhyar and Marc Edmund Jones were gaining popularity and younger proponents like Noel Tyl and Robert Hand were on the rise, but there was another movement afoot in Europe, mainly in Germany.
Most American and English astrologers of that time paid approximately equal attention to all of the major Ptolemaic aspects (conjunction, opposition, square, trine and sextile) and only slightly less to the minor Keplerian aspects (semi-sextile, semi-square, sesquiquadrate and inconjunct or quincunx), while they gave only a curt nod to more rarefied aspects like the quintile, biquintile, septile, novile and several others that arose from the harmonic theory of Vedic astrology. Although everyone was desperately trying to be “scientific” in their attitude, some of this enthusiasm spilled over into the realm of mysticism as “esoteric” or “spiritual” astrology inspired by Theosophist Alice Bailey.
On the other hand, the scrupulous Germans were largely unmoved by this wide-angle view. (I think they must have taken Hermes to heart, and if anyone knew about the hounds of the Abyss it was them and their Nordic compatriots.*) The inventors of the 90-degree and 45-degree aspect dials were less interested in navel-gazing than in figuring out what a birth chart might mean in more pragmatic terms. I learned that the Cosmobiologists (Reinhold Ebertin prominent among them) and the Uranian astrologers of Alfred Witte’s Hamburg School had no use for what they deemed the “soft” aspects (the trines and sextiles) since they are passive and seldom signify action unless otherwise energized. (Ebertin is still my “main man” for midpoint analysis.)
Similar to the “action-and-event-oriented” tarot that I practice, the German approach to natal astrology examined what might actually happen in the life of a native, not how he or she might feel about it or react to it psychically. To this end, they focused on the “hard” aspects in a chart — primarily squares, semi-squares and sesquiquadrates, with somewhat less emphasis on oppositions and conjunctions. The 90-degree square in particular was felt to be a dynamic motivator, kind of like a “burr under the saddle,” but all of these angular contacts were believed to precipitate events when activated by transits and other directions, not just generate a “personality profile” and dictate its application in self-awareness space.
All of this began to make more sense to me when, thirteen years ago, I steered a course away from New Age psychological astrology and into more mundane classical techniques with a special interest in horary event and election charts. I now had only the seven traditional planets, the Ascendant and Midheaven axes and their dependent houses, and the five Ptolemaic aspects to work with (although I still gave the trans-Saturnian planets a brief glance). I never did have much interest in the asteroids anyway (Rob Hand once called them “traveling gravel”), very little in the minor aspects unless part of a multi-planet pattern like the “Finger of Fate,” and none in the hypothetical “Uranian” (aka trans-Neptunian) planets, so it was no great loss.
Of course, I had to grapple with things like accidental dignities, a few arcane calculations like antiscia, an abundance of Arabian Parts and numerous fixed stars, as well as the “temperaments and humours” that had been supplanted by modern psychological interpretation. It turned out that the four character types (choleric/hot and dry; sanguine/warm and moist; phlegmatic/cold and moist; and melancholic/cold and dry) were all I had ever needed in the first place but didn’t know it. The qualitative snapshot they provide is perfectly adequate for all practical purposes, and anything beyond is largely superfluous except in a clinical sense.
The true epiphany for me has been the seamless convergence of horary astrology and predictive tarot. The narrow scope of a horary reading and the similarly limited focus of an event-based tarot reading offer a cohesive synergy, and the astrological correspondences for the tarot cards bring the two even closer together. The “hard” aspects in the chart and the cards related to the Greater and Lesser Malefics — Saturn and Mars — can be equated, as can the “soft”aspects and the cards associated with the Greater and Lesser Benefics — Jupiter and Venus. Mercury, as always, is a chameleon according to its sign in both the horoscope and the cards, while the horary Ascendant works informally with the cards connected to the Sun and Moon as it does in the natal Part of Fortune calculation. This alignment is provisional and not yet fully realized (I need a more compelling paradigm for the Sun and Moon cards), but so far it seems promising in practice as shown by my previous Astro-Taroscope readings.
*Full Disclosure: I’m of Germanic descent and once called the New Age “the False Dawn or Piscean pipe-dream” because astronomers tell us that the Precession of the Equinoxes won’t officially enter Aquarius until around 2150.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on October 16, 2024.
