My Life
I'm a 23 year old trans woman from Flagstaff, Arizona, although I was born in Phoenix. Some of y'all more familiar with your astrological history will recognize my city as the birthplace of Pluto. We still have special low-light-pollution streetlamps. Most of them, the older ones, they're sodium halogen lamps. This means that they're this really brilliant deep orange-gold colour, and just the most beautiful thing happens when it snows sometimes, the light scatters on the snow and on the clouds - something magic happens and the sky burns scarlet.
I really will have to get a good, DSLR photograph somewhere that's not my house as soon as possible, the sky here is just gorgeous all year round. Regardless, point being - I feel influenced a bit by that fire in the sky, and I find it fitting to my place as a Pluto in Sagittarius. My role in this world, the way I see it right now is to take that occulted vision into religious and philosophical things in order to empower marginalized people with magickal praxis. I aim especially to compile and provide modernized access to the western esoteric tradition. Thus far I've focused on Traditional Hellenistic Astrology, Hermeticism, Qabalah, and Modern Philosophical Astrology with some focus given to Asteroid Goddesses and Centaurs. I started out studying just on Twitter and on Tumblr posts for the early part of my exploration about three years ago now. Eventually I got started watching the Astrology Podcast, and after that point I'd fallen in love with Hellenistic. Course once that sunk in, and once I could really contend with how powerful Hellenistic astrology was, I was thrown into what was not an existential crisis, but rather an ontological crisis. I required a new framework of dealing with how things can happen, because I was now exposed to such a powerful descriptive tool that has noting to do with causation, something that could neither be explained nor eliminated given my working epistemic framework at the time. Thankfully I was already somewhat versed in western canonical philosophy, and so I had Hume and Hegel to assist me in dealing with these ideas of confounding synthetic waveforms manifesting narrativistic history, or of our own brains compiling a post-hoc narrative of identity. I still needed, however, a theory of enchantment and subtle influence, nothing I'm familiar with from a purely positivist frame really comes close outside of anthropology and in some ways Jungian-Campbelian mythopoetic theory, or perhaps some rather extreme mechanistic interpretations of the neurological model of Chaos Magick, but these all still depend fundamentally on a reductionism of the mind-body problem. Thankfully at this delicate time, during my ontological crisis, I was exposed to the work of Alan Moore which elucidated to me a framework of Hermeticism, and I've been studying it ever since. The final and longest-incubating influence to my working and practice is my perspective on ethics and politics, I'm an intersectional poststructuralist anarchist and Marxist historian. I'm also an autistic and BPD nonbinary trans woman, I consider myself a xenofeminist and an adherent to the frameworks of neuroqueer analysis and transmisogyny theory. As such, I feel it incumbent upon myself to offer my services as an astrologer to any mutual aid organizations, unions and co-ops, fundraisers, and other leftist projects as well as to any trans people seeking counseling on any part of gender transition. My Practice |
Traditional HellenisticThis type of astrology makes up a good deal of the bones to my practice, I learned it early and I love the rigour and a good deal of what I still learn gets filtered and contextualized through Hellenistic.
Hellenistic astrology is special because it's the earliest complete example from within the western tradition we have of a synthetic astrology which incorporates diurnal motion and therefore a house system into the ongoing persistent zodiacal motion of the chart. This system of twelve houses centered around four angles delineates the topics of life, for instance, whatever sign is the fourth, counting up in zodiacal order from the sign on the eastern horizon - that sign will be demarcated as the Underworld, under Whole Sign Houses at least. There are slightly more complicated house systems that have been since invented, but I'm well convinced by the simplicity of whole sign houses. Beyond that, Hellenistic astrology retains also and either codifies itself or preserves an older, lost codification of the Babylonian omen astrology. This schema is preserved by the Thema Mundi diagram which is said to put each classical planet in it's place, by the conceit that this is where they are to have been at the dawn of time, or the birth of the world. That combination of factors made it such a specific discipline that one can cast charts to discern what another person is holding behind their back. It is an extremely specific, refined and well-tested system of divination so powerful that I can not only discern events and atmospheres, but also timelines of processes for any given point in the chart, combining the Zodiacal and Diurnal motions into a singular system lays bare what I see as the seed code of the Universe. it is perfectly descriptive of all things happening upon the sublunar sphere of Earth, at all times. It does this by demonstrating and demystifying the bidirectional nature of time, that all meaningful events upon the film of spacetime cast back and forth in all directions. Or put in a more mundane fashion, all things have myriad, confounding, antecedent causes and cascading, succedent, unfolding consequences. Like ripples on a pond, they all interfere with one another, and with themselves. All one needs then is a static image of any given place and time and they can begin to reconstruct the rest of the Universe from first principles. Hellenistic astrology provides us both with a precise enough image of the nature of a relative spacetime and also the framework to build around it, to crystalize narrative from circumstance, and to glimpse memory and history from out of noise. My primary Hellenistic intellectual ancestors are Chris Brennan, Leisa Schaim, Austin Coppock, Kelley Surtees, Blaze Max, and Ariana Amour Modern PsychologicalThis type of astrology mostly for me fills in a few gaps I feel within the pure, Ancient Hellenistic tradition. I prefer to think of what I do as Hellenistic Revivalism or Postmodern Astrology as opposed to pure regurgitation, and part of that for me is absorbing the innovations of Mythopoetic structure and astrological examinations of depth psychology especially.
From the modern discipline, I inherit mostly an interesting set of thought experiments and modes from which I can better engage with a reflection of internality and externality and how that manifests within an individual life. As above, so below is a common phrase in western occulstism, but the ancients were denied such a clear model of how our environment becomes us, and how we carry it with us later in life. Something Traditional Hellenistic can get caught up in is external factors and forces, I've even seen some degree of rising sign reductionism which almost mirrors the 70s and 80s-style solar reductionism that came out of Modern Astrology and the New Age. I think that Jungian/Mythopoetic/Psychological lens helps us to understand exactly why we feel and behave as we do, because that's really how persistent themes appear subjectively within a life. I would argue that to believe in western esotericism, that is to accept that internality does reflect externality - that agency does reflect restriction - that the life does reflect the soul - that the Earth reflects Luna reflects Solis reflects Saturn. My primary Modern intellectual ancestors are Richard Tarnas, Aleister Crowley, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and Alan Moore Techniques EmployedI practice what is essentially Hellenistic Astrology in its technical aspects. I utilize the traditional schema of rulership as it exists in the Thema Mundi, I utilize Whole Sign Houses exclusively, I practice Horary astrology, and for timing I utilize transits, progressions, and to a lesser extent Zodiacal Releasing from Spirit, Fortune and Eros.
Although I think interesting observations can be made based on relationships between traditional and modern rulers, I see them as explicitly not affecting planets in the signs they're meant to rule over, and therefore I rely on visible planets. I use WSH largely because I don't like the idea that a planet can be in the same sign as the ascendant and yet be in the 12HS. I also don't like negotiating interceptions and duplications as this contradicts the logic of having the luminaries always each rule exactly one sign as the other visible planets each rule two. I find this logic highly compelling, descriptive and symmetrical. |
Hermeticism and PhilosophyAfter being exposed to Hellenistic Astrology, and really from the point of discovering that the discipline of astrology encompassed more than just solar reductionism, I was flung into a crisis of negotiating my own frame of relating to the universe. The high degree of specificity offered by a lineage which could reference back to that self-checking logic necessitated for me that I contend with the fact I could neither explain nor disprove astrology within a positivist framework, which is to say presuming that all real things can be measured quantitatively and understood.
This led me quite naturally into researching Hermeticism and in that, especially in Neoplatonic philosophy, alchemy and Hermetic Qabalah. I deepened my understandings of astrology and some of the diagrams I'd been given for within that practice, but much more profoundly, that singular discipline of Qabalah has shaped the way I engage with every piece of information since, I've been thrilled to find a map of metaphysics that actually works better the more I think about it. Basically the system works by having you compare energies until you can reduce everything down to a numerology, and then eventually start counting and seeing everything simultaneously on different layers of that numerology, and eventually the whole universe should make sense. Ideally. At the very lest so far it's made astrology all click together in quite a more satisfying way for me, as well as have it click well together into other systems like Tarot. My primary Hermetic influences are Lon Milo Duquette, Alan Moore, Dion Fortune, Aleister Crowley, Hermes Trismegistus and Jack Parsons Politics and SpiritualityOne thing I think is pretty explicitly indicated by any serious engagement with theology is that anarchy is what we as humans are designed to do, if there can be said to be any such thing as a human purpose. The world and theology and our societies and our very brains stop working correctly when we build these predatory little environments for ourselves. I very much believe that like wolves, we humans are a social species, and also like wolves we only develop alpha behaviors when we're living in oppressive, authoritarian, dystopian prisons.
But we're the only animal we know about that can definitely transcend that and why? We have the promethean fire of language - we can communicate and conceptualize of our suffering, can dread it, can witness and empathize and resolve to repair what made it possible. As such we are also the only animal that can know cruelty, because we're the only ones that can know anything aesthetic. As Ethics is merely, ultimately an opinion, yes - but I think the opinion that life-preserving and promoting practices of stateless communism to be fulfilling the obvious goal of ethics being that of establishing a functional and flourishing society. Because that's my point, Hume is right when he declares the is-ought gap impassible, but ethics is objective and scientific within the confines of it being pursuit of a specific goal of establishing Eudaimonia, or self-promoting society. Within the scope of pursuit towards a specific goal, the empiricism of success and failure becomes evident and knowable, and this in my view points us inextricably towards socialism. Under this lens I think it finally becomes legible what exactly is meant by the Christian Fall and other such theological instincts: it is an impulse to recapture the condition of Eden, being that which existed before the advent of agriculture, and the persistent dominion along with it. The anthropological record indicates that humans in preagricultural societies practiced what is called a gift economy in which members simply trade favors as-needed to keep the society functional and all its members cared for - like a family or a group of friends. But with agriculture came the capacity to simply guard and tax stationary resources forever, and then was invented despotism and all the authorities to follow. I would argue further that the narrative of history bears clear themes to the observant and among them is that liberation of people and marginalities enrich all but those maintaining coercive dominion, every time in history. The turn of phrase "Nobody is free as long as there is even one slave" is not just powerful but metaphysically true. Even those playing dress up as guards in the slave society are beholden to it, witnessed by it, made sullied by the earth that carries them and the acts their neighbors demand. Even those who seem to own power are owned by it, for fear of losing it, for fear of retribution for the force expended to maintain it. Therefore power is topheavy, it renders that system afflicted ripe for collapse. All systems of exploitation are systems of coercion in their hearts and all systems of coercion are destined to fall, the only question is the violence of protestation and the damages made when the fire of fascism consumes all its fuel and burns itself out. There are only two paths for humanity out of this state which perpetuates cyclical violence and devastation: we adapt or we die. Humanity thus far has had a very good track record adapting, and it can be demonstrated that we always carve out tiny reclusive refuges to hide our anarchism and communitarianism from the all-devouring State, and therefore I have faith. Which I see as something in some ways theologically necessary, to have faith in my common humanity that we will free ourselves from these prisons we have constructed. Until then I see it as my responsibility to do everything within my power to alleviate conditions within this hell and help bring about the apocalypse of this broken and shattered world. |