Friday 25 June 2010

Contest horaries - The strength of accidental dignity

I cast two recent contest horaries trying to find out the outcome of two matches. One was the football match between Greece and Argentina and the other one was the tennis match between R. Haase and Rafael Nadal in Wimbledon. Both matches had already started when I cast the charts.
The football match chart:


Since I supported Greece, Greece gets the first house and Argentina the 7th. In this type of questions, we are not interested in essential dignity, but instead we focus on accidental dignity, because we are looking for the one who has the power to win, not who is the best player or the best team in general. In this chart, from accidental dignity alone, it was fairly certain that Argentina was going to win. Its significator, the Moon, is in the 10th house. It doesn't matter that the Moon is in the sign of its fall, nor that Greece has the North Node on the Ascendant. Its significator, Saturn, is in the 8th house. If Saturn were also angular, then essential dignity and the North Node conjunction would have probably mattered and there would have been hope for Greece. But with such accidental debility, Greece was destined to lose.

The chart for the tennis match:



When I cast this, the two players were one set all and Haase was leading in the 3rd set. I was hoping that Nadal would lose and Haase's performance was fueling that hope. However, the chart was adamant. Nadal would win. He was extremely powerful in his own house. Haase's condition was not that bad, in the same sign as the IC, but by primary motion he was moving away from it. So, Nadal would get stronger and stronger. And so it proved.

Saturday 5 June 2010

The astrological paradox

Do astrologers believe in free will? They say they do, both modern and traditional ones, to some extent at least. In the western world we are born and bred with this belief that we are capable of turning our lives around, should we wish to do so. Astrologers are no exception. They usually say that a Saturn transit or progression is fate, in the sense that it is an astronomical certainty, but what you do with it is largely up to you.
Yet, what they believe is not what they practice. When something happens in the life of an individual we all look at their charts and try to find an astrological correlation. Why do we do that? I have yet to read or hear from an astrologer that this or that was supposed to happen, but free will intervened and nothing actually did. We all bend over backwards to find anything in a chart that could indicate whatever is going on. We never say "I can't find anything, so this person obviously exercised their free will". But if we believe in free will, shouldn't we say so from time to time?
The hard truth that we are not willing to face is that we DON'T truly believe in free will. Because if we did, we wouldn't care for astrology. We wouldn't study astrology, because if we believed that astrology sometimes has the answers and sometimes it doesn't, then what's the point in studying something so unreliable?
Some astrologers say that if you have a Sun/Saturn conjunction for example, you have the free will to manifest this in several ways, but within the limits of the meaning of this conjunction. You cannot turn this into a Sun/Jupiter one. But is that actually free will? I sincerely doubt it.
Astrology is all about fate and our job is to interpret it. I don't think we should mix free will with astrology, because that would lower our standards. If we can easily discard something as free will, then we will not make astrology better. We would stop searching and testing astrology techniques or inventing new ones. Instead, we should treat everything as fate.
What is free will anyway? Why would you want to change your fate? Who are you to decide what's good for you or what isn't? Can we be trusted to do the right thing? What IS the right thing?
We don't have answers for these questions. So, instead of fighting our fate just to prove that we are capable of gritting our teeth, we should perhaps co-operate with it and align our minds with the energy of our chart, whether we like it or not. And perhaps, when we completely understand it, when we totally embrace what life has to offer us, whether good or bad, then fate may actually begin to loosen its grip.