Astrology: Beginning Astrology Part 1

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: Beginning Astrology
Part One - Discovering

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The change

I'm not yet a qualified astrologer, nor do I play one on TV. However, this is the story of how I hope to become one and some ideas I have about how it fits in with the wyrd philosophy.

For many years, astrology for me was something in newspapers that never tied up from one publication to the next. It was entertaining when it seemed to fit, rubbish when it didn't or contradicted, but never a fascination. Naturally, those of us interested in astrology spend a great deal of time and effort trying to explain that this isn't what astrology is about at all. Sometimes, we come up against barriers made by those who just don't see any way it can work: "How can people only be divided into twelve types?" Sometimes they will listen as you explain that there's a lot more to astrology than sunshine; sometimes they will just throw up barrier after barrier because they don't want to hear. That's even harder to take - but one has to accept it; everyone's different. It's a good exercise in patience and understanding. It just makes it that bit more satisfying when someone does listen to you with a degree of open-mindedness.

It helps when I consider my own earlier skepticism and ignorance!

So saying, I've always been fascinated by the zodiac, if not always by astrology itself. I'd play games with the signs when I was small, inventing stories and adventures of a club where children would be awarded badges according to their achievements. Pisces, of course, was the ultimate badge. Naturally, as a Piscean I was fully neutral ;-)

It was interesting to learn in later years that there was a theory that people are reborn into the next sign along if they do well in their current life, though in fact I don't now go along with that. It seems way too neat and ordered, and I've lived in a bizarre and untidy world long enough to understand that nothing is so easy to categorise - especially people.

I also enjoyed stargazing, on rare moments when it was mild or dark enough to allow this, or I had sufficient patience. I now hold the firm belief that it's important to know some astronomy to be an astrologer - perhaps not strictly a requirement, but definitely useful and enabling.

I received my first pack of tarot cards at the age of 22; that's another story, but it was my true introduction to the esoteric world. I didn't immediately have much success with the cards, which led me to believe that I wasn't ready, so I let them be. However, in September 1995 I spotted a tarot and astrology course at a local college, and enrolled. My feeling is that the timing of this was something to do with my adoption of the wyrd philosophy, and that I was being offered an opportunity to do something that would really suit me: I hadn't thought about either astrology or tarot for some time, after all, so attending the course was more like a spur of the moment decision. That decision proved to be very good for me.

Night school

The class only ran for a term and the tutor wasn't particularly brilliant at her teaching, though at least she knew mostly what she was doing. However, that short class gave me a few hooks with which I could connect to the cards, including the idea that the numbers had a symbolic meaning which helped to make it all gel in my mind, and that they told a kind of story. In one of the usual echoes of wyrd, I now find myself studying aspects from the same numerological point of view and clicking with that method, too.

Though I'd enrolled for the tarot, I thoroughly enjoyed the astrology. By this point, I was ready for a more open-minded approach, and found that the subject was fascinating. I even liked playing with the maths and calculating charts, and I loved drawing up charts and making them colourful representations of a real person. It was too short a course to learn more than any basics, or to really understand that interpretation was a matter for intuition and time, but by the end of those ten weeks I knew that I wanted to take my studies much further.

Pisceans are sometimes woolly about what they want to do, and some of them prefer not to have to work at all; their emotional attitude to the world often makes them suffer in normal work conditions, and they have to feel secure. I knew that I loathed working in offices by then, but I also understood that if I took on a people job, like counselling, I'd most likely bring the work and the pain home with me. Here, then, I had the perfect opportunity to do something that I would really enjoy, and that would probably help others.

After some thought, I surfed the web intensely, found myself various correspondence courses and enrolled on the certificate course of the Faculty of Astrological Studies in London.

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: Beginning Astrology Part One - Discovering

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