How Many Bodies?
By Tom Jacobs
If you’re moving in any astrology or astronomy circles, you’ve been hearing a lot about the recent re-evaluation of just what makes a planet a planet. To some, there’s a hubbub about how this might change things for astrology.
My immediate response to the issue of redefining the solar system is, “And?” As a counseling astrologer, I use whatever I can get my hands on to counsel clients. I use a lot of things that are neither defined now nor about to defined as planets. If an archetype speaks to me, I agree to include it in my toolbox, and if when studying a client’s chart that archetype answers questions about what’s going on with that person, I use it in the counseling session. It seems to me that if my job is to help people understand their lives, I need to understand as much as I can about Life, and in astrological terms, I might need to be open to a lot more than the standard planets in order to do that.
So how many are enough? Where are you supposed to stop? If you start using Ceres and Juno, do you have to also use Ariadne, Adonis and everyone else? No one can answer these questions for you, and it turns out they’re not even very good questions when you really get what astrology is and does: As a symbolic language, astrology is going to be as useful to you as you are open to its symbols. You’re the interpreter of the interplay of energies in a chart(/person). How much are you willing to see? What are you, as a person on your own journey, prepared to see? This is in no way to put down anyone who doesn’t want to use asteroids or centaurs, the vertex or anything else. It’s simply to say that if you let your view get bigger, it will. If you don’t, it won’t. And truth be told, it doesn’t matter and no one cares. You’ll see the clients that need to see you - work the way you’re comfortable working.
Along the same lines, astrologers draw to them clients who not only need to hear certain things from them, but also have something to teach them. A fun way to see this in action is to pick a couple of asteroids or other not-standard things or bodies to work with and then, without committing to anything about them, without even committing to mentioning them in a session, see who comes to you for readings. If you ask to learn about something, your teachers in the form of clients will come.
Back to the redefinition of planets: If elevating the status of Ceres makes astrologers take the archetype more seriously, great. The nurturing mother archetype is a great one to teach people about. If the demotion of Pluto makes astrologers take the archetype less seriously, then we’re dealing with astrologers who aren’t tapped into the energy of their clients, which is to say the energy of human beings. Pluto is real. If what astronomers say about the physical properties of bodies affects the work that astrologers do with clients, there’s something amiss.
The value of an astrologer in my opinion and experience is that astrologer’s interpretations of the symbolic language in relating it to a client’s life and experience, in order to help that client see possibilities and make more informed choices based on the/a bigger picture. Interpretations will of course be informed by what is learned in courses and in books, but also they need to be informed by what is experienced. Specifically in counseling scenarios: Astrologers learn much more useful information from working with clients than cramming texts into their brains.
I first heard such a thing from astrologer Steven Forrest, who developed his work in response to dealing with actual, live clients in his early career. He was finding that a lot of what he learned in texts turned out just not to accurate, or at least not helpful to the living people who were sitting across the desk from him. Response to his work and his books include comments about how accessible and humane it and he is, and he’s a great example of an astrologer who’s more interested in doing good work than being right, even the former takes a lot more time and effort.
So you might be inspired to use asteroids, for example, if your teacher did, or if a particular book or text really spoke to you. But you need to find out for yourself through practice if they or other bodies make sense to you to use. I’m reminded of the example of the Vertex-Anti-vertex axis. I know people who are hesitant to use it because they haven’t been told what it is, people who don’t use it because it makes no sense to them in terms of their own experience, people who are looking at it to see what they think it means, and people who use it because events and contacts in their personal lives drew their attention to it and won’t let go of them. Each of these people is in precisely the right place with this axis, with letting or not letting it into their work.
In the end, you should use what you want to use, what you feel guided to use, or what makes sense for you to use. Let’s just not let the debate in astronomical circles distract us from our astrological work, which I hope will continue even after Pluto, once the truth of its physical state is finally revealed, is further demoted to the status of Chilled Cheese Sandwich in late 2009.
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September 11, 2006 By Tom Jacobs