Sinews in the Body of God
how is astrology possible: the omen model of astrology
I’m an astrologer. I study the stars to know the self, and I practice astrology to lend a hand to others on their own path to the same.
How can astrology work? Some wriggle out of the question. “it’s a metaphor”
Astrology is the practice of stellar omen interpretation. It was first described to me this way by my teacher Adam Elenbaas, and it represented a major revelation for me.
“So like, tarot? In the stars?” I asked.
I’d always thought of astrology as a totally separate category from the divinatory disciplines that I was already familiar with. This new way of thinking brought astrology under the same tent and rooted it in its original context.
Western astrology was first developed by ancient Babylonian priests, seeking patterns in nature - in things like the way the clouds passed over the setting sun to discern pragmatic information about the King or the state. These are omens – events in the material that speak to other, seemingly disconnected events. The tools of the practice can be any sufficiently diverse set of symbols, which together form an arcanum capable of describing the world around and within the diviner. This is the place of immense wonder and amazement that I feel most people engaging with divination simply gloss over – what kind of world must this be, where objects in one time and place can speak to events elsewhere in space and time?
The Causal Model
The explanation I see most often employed to address the “how and why” of astrology is what I term “the causal model.” It appears often in the way people casually talk about the planets (“that’s Mars’ fault” or “Saturn is being such a pain in my neck”). Under the causal model, the celestial bodies are seen as compelling or impelling influences – the stars are in some way acting on us as causal forces. And in a way it makes sense because, well, stars and planets are huge, they exert mass, force etc. It feels bordering on scientific.
In other forms of divination, casting disciplines such as tarot or geomancy, there’s nothing to draw us to this way of thinking – no one pulls the Tower and thinks the sign causes the shake-up that it portends. No, the card serves as a microcosmic image of your macrocosmic circumstances. But the stars are unique – rather than being a microcosm that speaks to the macro, they are “more macro” than the events they are able to speak to. They’re “out there,” and yet they can speak to our lives down here. The causal model seems almost scientific – astrology can speak to the life because the stars and planets are actors, exerting their bigger, more powerful forces onto human goings-on, Mars casts his baleful rays upon us and precipitates the events he portends.
Ok, but…
But like many elegant concepts, close inspection makes the whole house of cards fall down. If the stars and planets are acting on us, then how can the tropical Zodiac work? The signs that make it up are now quite distant from the physical stars that share their name due to axial precession. This is constantly bandied about to supposedly “debunk” astrology, but the idea that this should matter misunderstands the nature of tropical astrology. It’s an accepted fact – the Sun rising at 15° tropical Aries actually appears in the sky in front of the constellation of Pisces. The “rays” of the stars of Aries do not physically pass through the sun to reach the child born in that moment. And what about forms of astrology where the placements of the stars are simply symbolic? In Horary, for example, the querent asks their question, and we interpret the sky at the present moment to discern an answer. Horary can be used to ask questions about things in the past and future, using the position of the stars in the now. If the stars impel, how can their position now act as an omen for what will happen to us in the future?
The Point
Carl Jung says of natal astrology, “We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born.” But what if the planets aren’t simple calendrical arbiters of the quality of the season; what if they are not the causers of the events that they portend? Instead, what about this: the position of the stars and the events they portend are all equally products of a shared cause so large-scale that it is almost imperceptible from our perspective. The nature of this cause can only be glimpsed in pieces, and one of the ways to glimpse it is in the language of omens.
To illustrate this, I’ll borrow a metaphor.1 Imagine yourself as a 2-D creature (a line) living on a flat plane. If a 3-D sphere passes through a plane, it can only manifest in two dimensions: the sphere first touches the plane and appears as a dot, then grows to an increasingly large circle, reaches its widest point, shrinks until it becomes a dot again, and then is gone from sight. Our flat person can only see a portion of the 3-D sphere – they have no knowledge of the greater object or its activities in other points on their plane, and in fact, our friend the line’s suggestion that there might be a third dimensional thing called a “sphere” forging through space might get them several sidelong looks at the dinner party.
We operate in 4-D space as 3-D beings, and (for our purposes and Einstein’s) the 4th dimension is time.2 For us, our “sphere” is all time and space, but since we live on the “plane” of the 3-D, we can only, in the normal course of things, perceive events in the present that are near us in space. The present intersection of time and space is our flatland. Something extra-dimensional can enter our field of perception and we can see just a slice of it. But through the systems of omens built up through thousands of years of human effort and pattern recognition, we can perceive the sphere suggested by the point. I call this The Omen Model of astrology.
Instead of the stars as causal agents, I see instead an unseen hand of infinite dimension plunging through the material, turning as it goes a system of interlocking gears across all levels of manifestation, innervating them all with its motion. The events of the stars play out in the lives of man not because the one causes the motions of the other, but because the movement of the cosmos is the self-same movement of man. The body of God dances, its arms and legs make sweeping gestures across the skies, its fingers and toes dance across the Earth, its cells and organelles respond in kind, creating threads of seemingly disconnected synchrony in our realm. Synchronicity may not be truly acausal, but from our flatlander perspective it might as well be. It is the water that we’re all immersed in, and as such, the cause cannot be seen, only suggested. Our ancestors painstakingly crafted a system of omen seeing that triangulates the goings on of the sphere of time, allowing us to see the circle that suggests the sphere.3
Free Will
So what about us? Are we just gears in this divine body’s motion, our choices preordained? No. Our decisions are interactive – we too are the causers of our own results in the same way that events on the cellular level can cause macrocosmic events in the body. We with our conscious minds aren’t just the executors of cosmic choices, but participants in them. We can ask for omens and contextualize with astrology – asking, too, is a choice. In asking, the call goes out across the body’s tendons, and the language of omens speaks to us in the symbol set we understand, through the pathways we’ve built through study or experience. The unseen gears of fate allow the sign to cross our paths in the right moment, so uncannily that it gives the illusion that it was preordained to be there. This is why I practice, to give a space for myself and others to step back and reorient in the language of the stars to see the connection between us and everything else.
The Land of Limits
A divinatory tradition with rules creates the boundaries required for the reception of discrete information. If we are swimming in a world full of speech, we must have limits. Limits sheer shape from unhewn wood. The mind of a child is born with many thousands more neural connections than the brain of an adult. As a result, it is formless, structureless. The process of maturation is through the death of those connections – by the time a child is 10, 50% of the synaptic connections it had at age 2 will be eliminated. As it receives boundaries, structures can emerge – we take a step into Saturn’s domain, the first of many of these initiations. Routes that information cannot travel are required for actual things to take shape from the infinite. We need constraints, defined symbols with set meanings.
We need limits, too, in our practice. If we constantly ask for a breadcrumb trail to follow, keeping our eyes low seeking the signs, we ignore that we’re a critical part of God’s body – we profane the temple. We must be willing to be the executors of our own volition as a living piece of this reality. Choices, hard choices, without anyone’s hand on my shoulder whispering “you’re going the right way,” have been the most critical forks in the road of my life, because when we’re asked to stand alone in the dark, without aid, that’s when your little hermit’s lamp alights one of the ever-branching paths of fate with your choice. Through choices, we reach out to meet God, and it meets you. Its cosmic body responds to our own whispered messages, their impacts reverberate through its fibers, causing their own effects. In reading omens, we are engaging in this dance, sensing the everywhere-presence of immanence and alterity. When I’m most in line with myself, I simply move, the way a dancer communicates wordlessly with their partner, questions unasked on my lips, in union and synchrony.
Credit & Sources:
Teaching Lineage
friends & teachers noted here for gratitude & further learning.
Adam Elenbaas (my astrology teacher from 2016-2019) was the first to frame astrology to me in terms of stellar omens and provide a substantive alternative to the causal model & the metaphor model.
Chris Brennan & Leisa Schaim had a discussion on the intersection of predestination and free will on their episode of the Astrology Podcast on Zodiacal Releasing, which gave me a bunch of aha moments back in 2018 when I was first grappling with the implications on free will re: astrology’s predictive power.
Carl Jung’s book “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle” has a stack of case studies about ways in which dream state omens & more show up around the life of his patients.
Sevis, the only person who I’ve ever talked to about omens that had me enthusiastic nodding in fierce agreement the entire time.
Patrick Davis, Shailer Kern-Carruth & Ryland Garnett thank you for editing help and years-long conversations that shaped these thoughts in ways too broad-reaching to distill here.
More Info:
Visualizing higher dimensional motion: https://youtu.be/d4EgbgTm0Bg
[h/t Seth Russell]
Synaptic Pruning: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-is-synaptic-pruning-important-for-the-developing-brain/
Eric Wargo on retrocausality and omens: https://bit.ly/2PNvFaV
Edwin Abbott’s “Flatland”; Crowley also has a character deliver a similar explanation in.. I think it’s diary of a drug fiend?
My 2nd house Capricorn stelli won’t let me NOT tell you that this is not universally agreed upon by physicists by any stretch of the imagination - many physicists before and beyond einstein’s time believe that Time is separate altogether from space, dimensionally speaking. Cuz like why would it be it’s own dimension, as opposed to something more intrinsic to the fabric of the entire whole…but then again i guess ‘up/down’ dimension is functionally intrinsic to left/right dimension…anyway I like Brian Greene for sci communication to non-physicists - here’s him explaining time at 5 levels of difficulty (first to a 9 year old).
there’s something here about working memory & ADHD. dm me on instagram and ask me about working memory and why ADHD people who are not great at working memory are actually really good at thinking that requires this type of cognitive yoga.