As I’m approaching half a century of research into astrology, what I have chiefly learnt is that there are a great many methods of prediction but there are only three that work on a consistent basis, horary, transits and secondary progressions.
And even with these three there is still tremendous potential to get lost down some very minor avenue that will never reap anything beyond the occasional lucky hit.
With horary, if there is an applying aspect between the significator of the querent and the quesited, or between the Moon and either of these, the thing enquired about will come to pass. If not, it very likely won’t.
You can add all kinds of dumb things like antiscions, fixed stars, essential dignities by anything other than signs, mutual receptions, exclusions to the Void Moon principle etc. Some of these might even work in a haphazard fashion but are unlikely to help as reliable indicators.
These were all grafted on in a desperate attempt by astrologers of the past to explain things that would be perfectly evident if they had known about Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.
However horary is a method of divination that is particularly focused on the relationship between the astrologer and their client, so if any querent is dumb enough to go to a practitioner who insists on living in this kind of medieval theme park hologram, the Universe would probably take account of that fact and make them do so at a time that fits with that person’s own methods.
Transits are an area that has been covered so extensively on these pages that they barely need speaking about, but I found myself having to explain certain basic points to someone who had little understanding of how serious astrology works in practice, so maybe its worth restating some of these ideas here.
It may sound counterintuitive to make the transits of the outer planets much more important than the ones far closer to Earth, but this is how it works.
Everything in astrology has significance related to how rare it is. The fact that you have may the Sun in Aries is relevant because 11/12ths of the population do not.
If you have the Sun in Aries, Moon in Taurus and Gemini rising, this has a 12x12x12=1728 significance rating. And so on.
Transits have importance in impact relative to their frequency and the time they spend in orbs with your placement.
A major Pluto transit to your Sun (or any other placement) will occur once or twice in your life and last for 2 years.
A Moon transit to your Sun will occur every week and last for 4 hours.
A Sun transit will occur every 3 months and last for a couple of days.
A Saturn transit will occur every 7 years and last anything from one month to one year.
So the impact of a Pluto transit on your life will be over 2,000 times more powerful than that of the Moon, 200 times that of the Sun and even 6-7 times that of Saturn.
So the traditional half wits who might get away with neglecting the outer planets when it comes to their own quaint horary practices will be completely out of the loop when it comes to forecasting anything of significance from a natal chart.
Given that the most important transits are those of the non personal outer planets, our experiences of them does seem to be of the nature of things from “out there” happening to us.
When it comes to secondary progressions it is pointless focusing on the outers.
With a day for a year as the method, a whole lifetime would be contained within three months, and it’s very likely that the outers wouldn’t have moved at all in that time, much least made new aspects to other planets.
Saturn would move less than 3 degrees in a lifetime, even Jupiter would only move about 10.
So with progressions we are dealing with the personal planets alone. Because of this, the way we interpret them should not be so much to do with outer events that happen to us. We should see these movements as an unfolding of our own personal path through life.
Our chart placements reflect the different parts of ourselves, progressions are about our development, as they make aspects to these, they reveal what areas of our lives we need to bring into focus, work and live with.
It is through a major progression that we gain most insight into the role each of these placements have in our lives.
Unfortunately, most people do not use secondary progressions at all, those that do might refer to a change of sign or house of the Sun or Moon.
I’m instinctively against this kind of thing.
The progressed Sun will be in a sign for 30 years (on average it will be in a house just as long). Are we seriously suggesting that these periods have a collective experience that is radically different from the preceding 30?
My experience is that it’s the actual degree that you have planetary placements that indicate you and your experience.
Since the progressed Sun moves roughly a degree per year, and we are using an orb of one degree, its aspect to a natal placement will last for two years.
Consequently the progressed Moon will form a similar aspect for about two months.
Over the course of a normal lifetime, the progressed Sun will make one major aspect with each of your placements, but only one. Each one is therefore very important, in terms of the meaning of that placement and its role in your life.
It goes without saying that conjunctions are the most significant of all aspects.
In the case of some charts the progressed Sun would form no conjunctions at all in a lifetime, most people are likely to have 2 or 3 at least.
I am coming up to my 69th birthday. I have had two progressed Sun conjunctions to date, but they are the most important ones you could have.
I have the Sun and Moon in Capricorn, by Equal House system they are both in the 12th, by Placidus the Sun is in the 11th. For me I find both house systems work.
Neither of my lights receives difficult aspects, and my Moon is blessed with sextiles to Venus, Mars and Saturn.
My childhood was conventional and relatively uneventful, certainly when I compare it to that of most of the people whose charts I have studied.
I lived in a small village in North Wales, my parents were loving, although not prone to showing their emotions. They were quite strict in a “children should be seen and not heard” way and were very much a part of the village community which was focused around the church.
I attended church activities three times on Sunday and various groups related to it at other times in the week.
The village school had small classes but I was usually in the top one or two in my reports. I was not so much a big fish in a small pond as an above average sized goldfish swimming around a bowl in the same direction.
It all felt extremely secure and very orderly, all very Sun / Moon Capricorn.
Until I was 12 and my progressed Sun reached the conjunction with my Moon.
Then my Dad lost his job and got a new one in London, so the family moved to Home Counties suburbia.
London in 1967 was a very different place to Denbighshire which has probably remained in the 1950s. I suddenly became an extremely naive and uncool little tiddler in a vast ocean. I joined a high school two terms after everyone else in my new class had already settled and I didn’t cope at all well with this change coming right on the cusp of adolescence.
Capricorns make very poor teenagers anyway and my response was a classic 12th house one, I stopped being someone with a reasonable degree of self confidence and withdrew into my shell and became a fairly miserable loner.
I had no knowledge of astrology so was totally unaware that this was exactly the right direction for me to go in given my progressed Sun had conjoined a 12th house Moon.
This state of affairs continued for a decade. Until I was in my early twenties when my progressed Sun formed the other conjunction, with my Ascendant.
I need to qualify this by explaining that my Ascendant is 28.08 Capricorn and part of a very tight T square involving Uranus at 26.33 Cancer, Chiron at 27.14 Capricorn, Jupiter 27.31 Cancer and an apex Neptune in the 9th house at 27.54 Libra.
Jupiter and Uranus, I consider to be 7th house planets because they are within a couple of degrees of my Descendant.
So before it reached the conjunction with my Ascendant, my progressed Sun formed an opposition with my 7th house Uranus.
Two things happened. I discovered astrology and began my first serious relationship. I am sure the two things were connected, because she believed me to be a very interesting and cool astrologer.
It didn’t last as, with my progressed Sun conjunct Chiron and opposite Jupiter (7th) the following year, her family emigrated to the US.
I had just recently discovered Buddhism as well as astrology and with the progressed Sun square to Neptune I went on an extended retreat, where I learnt a wide variety of meditation techniques.
With this powerful resource my life completely changed and as the Sun progressed onto my Ascendant, it was as if I started my life properly.
It’s particularly interesting to me as my progressed Venus undertook the same journey over 40 years later when an increased exposure as a consultant astrologer ( pVE 180 UR) led me to meet my true soulmate (pVE 180 JU in 7th) and to journey to the other side of the world (pVE 90 apex NE in 9th) get married and to start my life again (pVE 0 ASC).
Coming back to the progressed Sun to Ascendant in 1978, my knowledge of astrology was sufficient at this point that I understood the enormous significance of this period in my life and I wondered how to celebrate the month where the aspect was exact.
There was only one place to go for this. Glastonbury.
The powers that be would claim Canterbury as the spiritual centre of England because the Anglican Church has its HQ there.
The city with its Cathedral and Archbishop is the Jupiter/9th house centre of organised religion but its location in Kent has more to do with its easy access to the continent than anything else, because it was the first settlement to be conquered by the Romans.
So it’s claim to be the focus of all things holy in England is actually based on the fact that it was an easy target for any bunch of foreign marauders.
Anyone with an understanding of astrology will know that true spirituality, a mystical understanding of one’s true place in the greater scheme of things is the province of Neptune.
Jupiter’s version is to construct an edifice that merely gives philosophical authority to the rulers of the day.
While Jupiter’s English centre is Canterbury, Neptune’s is Avalon – Glastonbury.
In the distant past, spiritual places were invariably located on high points. There were two reasons for this. The first was so the inhabitants could spot invaders coming (which might have helped Canterbury as it’s barely above sea level).
The second reason was to give the people who lived in the land below something to revere and look up to.
In times gone by, everyone understood this, both the ruling classes who would build monuments on them and their subjects who would be in awe of them. Nowadays people just erect churches anywhere, as long as it suits them.
The area around Glastonbury is the Somerset levels, very flat.
At its centre is a conical shaped hill that rises to over 500 feet, giving a commanding view for many miles around. The shape of the hill is so pronounced that it looks as if it must have been man made, but it wasn’t, it was formed during the early Jurassic period.
Glastonbury is by far the strongest example of this natural geographic principle in the whole country.
These days we have lost the capacity to be awestruck. The incredible panorama of the night sky with the perfectly placed planets, entirely there to help us understand our lives, their crazy events and patterns and our own place in the vast scheme of things, is totally ignored in favour of watching some pea brained half wits desperately trying to prove their relevance by attempting to eat some insects on TV.
Back in the day, the church of St Michael, perched on the top of Glastonbury Tor would be a place of reverence, because it was symbolically able to bring down and channel the forces of the heavens.
The Tower, or Tor as it is commonly called is what remains of the church, is named after the St Michael’s ley line that crosses southern England.
Ley Lines are straight tracks that acts as conductors of spiritual energy. They commonly follow natural landmarks and contours.
Ancient peoples were aware of these energies to the point where they built churches and other important places along these lines at places where the energy is most strongly evident.
Ley lines run across the country and are anything from a few miles long to several hundred.
The longest and most powerful is the St Michael’s Ley Line which runs from Mont St Michel off the coast of southern Cornwall to the site of the cathedral at Bury St Edmonds in Suffolk.
This line runs through the stone circle at Avebury, Burrowbridge Mump, Brentor in Devon but the most prominent point on it lies at Glastonbury Tor.
I was already familiar with the St Michael’s ley line, having visited many of the ancient churches on it with my dowsing rods and having walked the 50 mile stretch from Avebury to Glastonbury in an earlier pilgrimage.
But to celebrate my progressed Sun’s passage over my Ascendant, I set out to walk the complete outline of the Glastonbury Zodiac.
There are several Terrestrial Zodiacs around the world, but Glastonbury’s is the most famous.
The Glastonbury Temple Of Stars is an enormous landscape Zodiac covering an area of over 30 miles, mapped out by natural features of the land like rivers and earthworks, that has been reinforced over the years by ancient tracks, man made roads and field boundaries.
The constellation shapes are clearly visible on an Ordnance Survey map.
Glastonbury is strongly linked to the legend of King Arthur and his 12 knights of the Round Table, which is obviously a story of the Sun and the Zodiac, even the temperaments of the knights correspond to those of the Sun signs.
The existence of the Glastonbury Zodiac has been known for a long time. The Elizabethan magician and court astrologer, John Dee was fascinated by it.
The obvious place to start this odyssey is from the top of Glastonbury Tor, in the Aquarius segment of the Zodiac.
I particularly wanted to explore my own sign of Capricorn so decided to do the Zodiac backwards, my very own version of Precession.
Through my Buddhist studies I was familiar with walking meditation, the practice of placing my awareness solely on my breath and the contact that my feet made with the ground and if my mind chose to wander, the importance of constantly bringing my consciousness back to those two things.
It was the late Summer of 1978 and the weather in the UK was good so sleeping under the stars was not a problem. Tracing all of the Zodiac shapes on foot took me 10 days.
This was an important time in my right of passage as an astrologer, because up until this point my studies had been largely an intellectual pursuit.
With my walk around the Zodiac, I felt that my whole being was connecting with this phenomenal subject and ever since I have used solitary walking as an opportunity to meditate and allow any astrological insights to well up into my consciousness.
It is while walking in this way that I gain much inspiration for the subjects of the articles on these pages.
I was familiar with Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan from my Christian upbringing.
He who would true valour see,
Let him come hither;
One here will constant be,
Come wind, come weather.
There’s no discouragement
Shall make him once relent
His first avowed intent,
To be a pilgrim.
But if you strip away the church’s slant on this, you can see it is a tribute to one sign above all others, Capricorn.
It’s not exactly certain what date Bunyan was born but it was in late November 1628. It’s likely that he had an early Sagittarius Sun.
One thing we do know is John Bunyan had Jupiter at 5 Capricorn. Exactly conjunct my own Sun.
Although my own Jupiter has taken me to the other side of the world, my apex Neptune in the 9th house still feels in touch with the spirit of Avalon.
Posted on 1 Jan 2024
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