Astrological Insights - The Basics
Astrology is an extremely ancient and diverse discipline and cannot possibly be covered in complete detail here. The purpose of this short summary is to provide you with an understanding of a few basic concepts, and possibly stir your desire to learn more. There are excellent books for beginners available, such as Astrology for Dummies and others, which do a great job of putting astrology in terms that are easily understood. In the past most of the books available were overly technical and hard to decipher.
Three key pieces of information are needed if an astrologer is to draw up a chart for you: where you were born, the date of your birth, and, if possible, the time that you were born. If you do not have your time of birth, the astrologer will still be able to do a chart but it will not be as detailed. The astrologer will then draw up a chart based on the position of the planets when you were born. From this chart he or she can then tell you what you can expect in your life, what your childhood was like, what talents you possess, the negative aspects of yourself that you will have to overcome and your positive traits as well. You can also find out, if you wish to, what you are here to accomplish in this life.
If you have retrogrades in your chart - and most people have at least one - it means that you did not learn certain lessons in a previous life or lives and so came back to try again. Say, for instance, that Mercury, the planet governing communication, is retrograde in your chart. This means that in a previous life you miscommunicated something important either through the spoken or written word. Perhaps you taught incorrect information, or wrote books that were severely flawed in the information that they gave. If this is the case, you will probably find in this life that you have difficulty communicating. A client of mine with Mercury retrograde has dyslexia, another has difficulty communicating vocally, and another has difficulty writing.
A birth chart has planets, signs and houses. There are ten planets used in astrology, and all ten are found in every birth chart. The astrological sign containing each house and each planet differs with each person, but these planets influence all of us. The ten planets are the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus and Pluto (in spite of its recent scientific demotion!). They represent the ten basic and distinct ways that we express ourselves, whether negatively or positively, and when that information is combined with the information represented by the signs and houses a detailed description of a person emerges.
If you would like to learn more, there are a multitude of ways to do so - there are several books as I have mentioned before, there is the internet and its vast wealth of information, there are workshops (I teach a few personally - see the link to the right), and so on. I usually suggest reading books on sun signs as a good starting point. Once you have learned about Sun signs, then you can move on to reading about Moon signs, then about Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. If you take it one step at a time you will find astrology a wonderful discipline to learn, not only as a subject, but also as a tool to help you understand yourself. Once you do that then you can start to learn about others around you and understand why they are the way they are.
- Insights to This Month's Birth Sign: Taurus
