Unlearning: what it takes to move from modern to traditional practice

Most people who come to traditional astrology have already learned another kind. They arrive with a working vocabulary, a chart they can read aloud, and — this is the difficulty — a settled order in which they look at things. The new material is not hard. The old order is.

It is closer to learning to write with the other hand than to learning a new subject. The knowledge is not missing; it is competing.

The first obstacle is not technical

Someone who has read charts competently for ten years has a reasonable investment in the idea that they have been reading them correctly. Being told that the order of operations was wrong is not received as information. It is received as an accusation.

It helps to notice that every traditional practitioner now working went through exactly this, because there was nowhere else to start. The material was not available in English in any usable form until the 1980s. Nobody in the field learned it first.

It also helps to be precise about what is being claimed. Not that the older astrology is an interesting alternative. The claim is narrower and more awkward: it is the astrology that was practised continuously for about two thousand years, and what replaced it around 1900 was a reform carried out by people who, in a number of documented cases, had not read the material they were reforming.

Determinism: a misunderstanding worth clearing up

The standard objection is that traditional astrology is fatalistic. It is not, and the accusation confuses a practice with some of its practitioners — of whom there are fatalistic examples in every school, modern ones included.

What traditional technique does is state, in advance, the conditions under which a thing can happen. That is not the same as asserting that it must. A planet that lacks dignity, lacks reception and lacks a place cannot deliver what it signifies, however sincerely the native wants it to. Saying so is a statement about capacity, not about destiny — and it is far more useful to a client than a reassurance that anything is possible.

Clearing the chart

The practical work starts by removing things. This feels like vandalism for about a fortnight.

The bodies

Seven planets: the lights, the two benefics, the two malefics, Mercury. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto go, and with them the asteroids, the points and the midpoints. The rule behind it is not arbitrary — the system is built on what is visible, and on the doctrine of sect, dignity and rulership that visibility supports. A body with no domicile, no exaltation, no triplicity, no term and no face has no way into that system. There is nothing for it to do.

The empty chart is disconcerting for a week and then becomes readable. What the extra bodies mostly supply is a way of never having to decide.

The aspects

Conjunction, sextile, square, trine, opposition. The minor aspects go. So, at first, do the aspect lines drawn across the middle of the chart: they invite the eye to start with the geometry, and starting with the geometry is the single most persistent modern habit. Dignity first, condition second, aspect third. The lines can come back once that order is automatic.

The orbs

Orbs belong to the planets, not to the aspects. Each planet carries its own moiety, and two planets aspect when the distance closes to the sum of their halves. This is a genuinely different model and it changes the chart: some familiar aspects vanish, and some contacts appear that no modern setting would have shown.

The houses

Whole sign or a quadrant division is a real question with a real literature, and it will not be settled here. The requirement is narrower: understand the mathematics of whichever you choose, well enough to say what it divides and why. The one indefensible reason is that it was the default setting in the software.

No additives

The clean chart is a starting point, not an achievement. The harder habit is the felt need to add something to the reading — mythology, therapeutic language, a system of chakras, a tarot card at the end.

Each of these may be worth something in its own right. Inside a consultation they usually do one specific job: they fill the gap where a judgement should be. When the technique runs out, something has to be said, and what gets said is whatever the astrologer also knows.

Put plainly: if the astrology does not work without additions, the problem is not the astrology. This is not a moral failing. Most practising astrologers were taught an incomplete system and then found, quite reasonably, that it needed supplementing.

Past lives, and the temptation to leave the present

A related habit is the drift towards previous incarnations and future evolution. Both move the conversation away from the one period the chart can actually be tested against — the client's present life, which they can check.

A careful judgement of what is in front of the native now is more impressive than any speculation about what came before, and considerably more useful. It is also the only kind of statement that can be wrong, which is precisely what makes it worth making.

Beliefs stay outside

Astrologers hold religious convictions or hold none, and either kind can read a chart well. What neither kind should do is let the conviction into the judgement. A consultation is a position of some power: the client has come with a real difficulty and will take seriously what is said. Using that position to convey a private cosmology is a misuse of it, whether it is done directly or by implication.

Patience, and the awkward requirement of trust

The whole process asks for two things that are not compatible with speed.

The first is time. Learning the concepts takes a while; unlearning the previous ones takes longer; regaining the fluency you had before takes longer still. Most people who abandon the attempt do so during the middle stage, when the old method has been dismantled and the new one is not yet quick.

The second is a provisional trust. You cannot verify the system before you have learned it, and you cannot learn it without extending it enough credit to work through the first difficult judgements. This is uncomfortable, and there is no way around it — only through it, one worked chart at a time.

Our own course is arranged around exactly this problem, which is why it takes three years and not six months.