waybread
Well-known member
This is from my post #4. I can elaborate at greater length, if you're actually interested.
My explanation is built on a theory, debated by linguists, that learning a new language gives you a window into a new understanding of space and time. Notably but not exclusively through verb tenses, languages express their own understandings of time. English, for example, has all kinds of nuances about past and future times that many other languages lack. In German, future verb tenses are constructed out of past verb tenses, showing the future as unfolding out of the past.
Most languages are linear, following a "time's arrow" sequence of past, present, and future.
In a map, horoscope, or another form of graphic communication like a photograph, however, we can grasp the whole simultaneously. Or we can focus on different parts of a complex picture, without necessarily following a linear progression. Our eyes can move up, down, left, right, or in some other sequence.
By analogy, we have trouble reading or listening to a phrase structured like: " trouble like analogy phrase by structured a have like reading like listening or analogy," because our written and spoken language is linear and one-directional. We can't comprehend so well simultaneously of by randomizing the order of the text.
We don't have this linear straight-jacket with most forms of graphic communication. (For using the night sky in this fashion see Bernadette Brady's YouTube lectures on Visual Astrology.)
So studying horoscopes opens up the astrologer's mind to new ways of understanding time simultaneously or in a non-linear order, and new ways of communicating space.
For example, if I post my horoscope, even though we've never met and I live so far away that we probably never will meet, you can say something about me based upon glyphs and lines on a page. You can consider what happened to me 20 years ago or what will happen next week. You can look at my "money house" (#2) out of sequence after my 9th house. Or before my 1st house. There's no set linear order.
One trouble with causal models of astrology is that traditional western, modern, and Vedic astrology work very differently. Sidereal and tropical astrology don't put the planets in the same places: today we're about 24 or 27 degrees apart, depending upon the sidereal system used. House cusps can vary widely for one person depending upon the house system used. Yet skilled astrologers from vastly different schools of thought can nevertheless come up with valid readings.
This shouldn't be possible if astrology were causal to the point of being deterministic or fatalistic.
Much of what we interpret isn't even up in the sky: it's calculated data points.
Geoffrey Cornelius, in The Moment of Astrology, talked about the "wrong" chart nonetheless being radical.
Gravity, electromagnetism or what-have-you emanating from planets makes no sense in terms of explaining why a woman with an afflicted Venus in Scorpio is often jealous. It makes even less sense in terms of explaining how such forces could affect a moment in time like a horary question, because there's nothing tangible there to be acted upon.
In a horoscope reading, I synthesize symbols on a computer screen (formerly on a page.) Isn't this what you do?
As a stylized representation of the cosmos, the horoscope is a type of map. As a map, it is a form of graphic communication. The act of astrology takes place in the mind of the astrologer reading a form of graphic communication that has no necessary obligation to follow a linear model of time.
This is unlike my post, which you would read from left to right, and then top line to bottom line.
Did you see the movie Arrival? Highly recommended.
My explanation is built on a theory, debated by linguists, that learning a new language gives you a window into a new understanding of space and time. Notably but not exclusively through verb tenses, languages express their own understandings of time. English, for example, has all kinds of nuances about past and future times that many other languages lack. In German, future verb tenses are constructed out of past verb tenses, showing the future as unfolding out of the past.
Most languages are linear, following a "time's arrow" sequence of past, present, and future.
In a map, horoscope, or another form of graphic communication like a photograph, however, we can grasp the whole simultaneously. Or we can focus on different parts of a complex picture, without necessarily following a linear progression. Our eyes can move up, down, left, right, or in some other sequence.
By analogy, we have trouble reading or listening to a phrase structured like: " trouble like analogy phrase by structured a have like reading like listening or analogy," because our written and spoken language is linear and one-directional. We can't comprehend so well simultaneously of by randomizing the order of the text.
We don't have this linear straight-jacket with most forms of graphic communication. (For using the night sky in this fashion see Bernadette Brady's YouTube lectures on Visual Astrology.)
So studying horoscopes opens up the astrologer's mind to new ways of understanding time simultaneously or in a non-linear order, and new ways of communicating space.
For example, if I post my horoscope, even though we've never met and I live so far away that we probably never will meet, you can say something about me based upon glyphs and lines on a page. You can consider what happened to me 20 years ago or what will happen next week. You can look at my "money house" (#2) out of sequence after my 9th house. Or before my 1st house. There's no set linear order.
One trouble with causal models of astrology is that traditional western, modern, and Vedic astrology work very differently. Sidereal and tropical astrology don't put the planets in the same places: today we're about 24 or 27 degrees apart, depending upon the sidereal system used. House cusps can vary widely for one person depending upon the house system used. Yet skilled astrologers from vastly different schools of thought can nevertheless come up with valid readings.
This shouldn't be possible if astrology were causal to the point of being deterministic or fatalistic.
Much of what we interpret isn't even up in the sky: it's calculated data points.
Geoffrey Cornelius, in The Moment of Astrology, talked about the "wrong" chart nonetheless being radical.
Gravity, electromagnetism or what-have-you emanating from planets makes no sense in terms of explaining why a woman with an afflicted Venus in Scorpio is often jealous. It makes even less sense in terms of explaining how such forces could affect a moment in time like a horary question, because there's nothing tangible there to be acted upon.
In a horoscope reading, I synthesize symbols on a computer screen (formerly on a page.) Isn't this what you do?