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Exegesis Volume 2 Issue #7
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Exegesis Digest Thu, 13 Mar 1997 |
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Exegesis Volume 2 Issue #7
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Exegesis Digest Thu, 13 Mar 1997 |
Date: Thu, 13 Mar 1997 02:47:41 +0000
From: Matthew Wilson
Subject: Re: Exegesis Digest V2 #4
NMU writes > Lastly, I am of the opinion that a conception chart is irrelevant, and > another unnecessary addition to what is already a complex art. There are so > many points, fixed stars,arabian parts, yet-to-be-discovered planets etc > being thrown carelessly into the chart analysis nowadays at the expense of > the incredible riches of our tradition or as a substitute for careful > analysis. (No, that does _n_o_t_ mean I'm some kind of Luddite who wants to > turn the clock back or deny innovation. Nor does it mean that I find the > aforementioned areas of astrology to be useless. But so often the points > etc are used to obfuscate, confuse or to demonstrate the cleverness of the > astrologer and to disguise the paucity of his/her real knowledge. Or else as > some kind of amazingly complex intellectual mind game which has no point > except for kind of mental calisthenics. We're so clever inventing all these > little games to play which disguise the "truth" instead of revealing it.) It > is possible to extract so much information from the basics (signs, houses, > the 10 planets + asc & MC, ptolemaic aspects + (perhaps) inconjunts, > semi-sextiles and semi-squares) that in the end other methods, theories or > techniques so often just add sauce to the main dish, they add nice little > touches but that's it. I mean you can talk for hours just about ONE aspect > in the chart, the infinite variations on a theme therein. Should we not > concentrate on honing the fundamentals? - the treasures within them cannot > be exhausted.
I agree ... however I think the problem is not new... Ptolemy describes the proliferation of Arabic Parts the numbers of which seemed to increase daily and that was 1,500 years ago. The main problem seems to be the failure of our current tools: astrologers are attempting to predict using tools which over the years have got rusty or misunderstood - especially from mistranslations of the classical material (see Project Hindsight). Hence the reduction of predictive classical astrology (albeit with complexity) to vague psychological astrology.
The proof of this is in the pudding: how many Western Astrologers can do what good Jyotish are able to? - that is to tell you your date and time of birth just from looking at you and the palm of your hand.
Matthew Wilson
>>I would like see some more opinions >>on the conception chart issue. It seems to me that a chart of >>one's conception would likely have meaning, and usefulness, >>however I am concerned >>that people are accepting questionable methods for obtaining such >>a chart. >> Any thoughts on the subject? > >I'm sure this post will provoke comment;) > >If we take conception to be the moment that the egg is fertilized, >it is impossible to ACCURATELY ascertain the moment of conception >from a medical point of view unless you have an electron >microscope in the vicinity at the time. All astrological formulas >which claim to be able to do so are purely artificial constructs >which have no basis in the (for want of a better word) >"reality" of nature. The sperm fertilizes the egg in it's own good >time, sometimes hours later, sometimes almost immediately. That's >rather too large >a margin of error for astrology to handle, esp. when the ascending >degree can change as quickly as every 4 minutes. That point in >time when our lungs first gulp the air is the only truly >measureable one.
At the moment of conception, when the sperm penetrates de cell membrane of the ovum, the polarity of the woman's galvanic skin potential suddenly changes in such a way that it is extremely easy to measure it. For the last 20 years there have been in the market all sorts of electronic gadgets making use of this fact in order to detect the instant when conception occurs. For years these devices were being advertised in magazines like Psychology Today's classifieds. Women who cannot tolerate birth-control pills and have to resource to some sort or "rythm" birth-control, often need to know immediately when they get pregnant to then take an anti-implantation pill. there are other reasons why women want to know exactly when they got fecundated. But, astrologically speaking, it has always been held that the polarity of the sign of the Moon at the moment od conception determines the sex or the embryo. During my many years of very active astrological practice, I have gathered a few "charts of conception" and they do tend to agree with this. Recently I saw a chart of conception of a boy where the Moon is in Capricorn, which has labile polarity and can be either positive (male) or negative (female), but it is in partile conjunction to Mars of the mother, explaining why the polarity was positive, even though Capricorn tends to conceive female organisms, since it is next to a definitely male sign, Sagittarius. I have seen conception in the chart many times, and I have always seen the Moon/Mars conjunction, sometimes transit to natal, sometimes progressed to natal, sometimes transit to transit, sometimes progressed to progressed, but it is always there, a Moon/Mars conjunction signifying the sperm reaching the ovum and fecundating it. I have seen conception occur when the transiting Moon conjuncts the progressed Moon partiling over natal Mars. I have also seen conception under a transiting Moon/Mars conjunction over natal Moon. I have had many women clients who, usually in the context of rectification of their charts when they have to give me the important dates of their lives which frequently includes their childrens' birth times for rectification purposes, on their own mention that they knew "exactly" when conception occurred, because they "clearly felt it". I would imagine it should be easy to feel if your galvanic skin responde swings wildly at the moment of conception, as experiments have demonstrated since many years ago. Sometimes they say they "felt a shiver" Several of these women were able to tell me the exact time when they felt conception had occurred, and I was convinced they were right whenever I see the expected Mars/Moon conjunction partiling. Last summer I had a woman come to me to help her plan a conception through astrology. She is a very intelligent woman and a practicing microbiologist at a local hospital. She explained to me that she is single but has an affair with a married man with impotency problems, but that she wanted a child from him. After rectifying both her chart and her man's, I saw that her progressed Moon was about to conjunct her Mars and that the transiting Moon would join at a moment when she'd be fertile according to her periods record which she'd been keeping. However, simultaneously, her ruler of her 5th Cusp, Jupiter, was forming very bad aspects to her chart, including a square to her Moon. But since the conception conditions were there, I told her that I was sure her lover was going to be able to get it hard and fecundate her, but that there could be additional problems because of Jupiter's transits. Past that date then, she phoned to make another appointment to see me, and as she walked into my studio for her reading, she greeted me with a stoppered test tube in her hand. When I asked what it was she replied that it was the result of the conception I had seen in her chart. I took a look at the test tube and indeed I could see a tiny something floating in the liquid. she explained to me that indeed conception had occurred the exact moment we'd foreseen -they had made love the night before, and this was mid-morning the day after. However, after 11 days, the embryo, now already past the early gastrula stage (she showed me the microscope picture of it that she'd taken), for unknown reason, disimplanted itself from her uterus and was expelled. She was keen enough to sense something was going wrong, partly because we were expecting it because of the transiting Jupiter square her Moon, and upon screening under the microscope her vaginal secretions, was able to detect the failed embryo to show it to me. I was so happy, because if she hadn't been a microscopist, I wouldn't have had confirmation that fecundation had indeed occurred under the aspects I'm used to see it happen.
>Secondly, if we talk of conception/birth, we must talk of the >soul. Accurate >and well-documented psychics such as Edgar Cayce have taught that >when an entity becomes ensouled is subject to a high degree of >variation. Cayce stated that sometimes the soul hovers over the >newly-born child (sometimes for days) deciding whether to >incarnate or not. He also insisted that the chart at the moment of >actual physical birth rather than conception is the most accurate >reflection of one's nature.
If you go buy a car, you might take a look at several, and take your time to decide which one you'll get....maybe return with your wife again the next day for a second look before making up your mind. Every car at the agency has its own chart, but the transits activating your synastry with the charts of all the cars there is behind your apparently freely willed decision to select this particular vehicle. The soul, in its ignorance, may believe its is deciding whether to ensoul in this baby in this craddle, or hover over to another craddle to make up its mind. Actually it is only a matter of synastric resolution under a given transit matrix.
>Lastly, I am of the opinion that a conception chart is irrelevant, >and another unnecessary addition to what is already a complex art. >There are so many points, fixed stars,arabian parts, >yet-to-be-discovered planets etc being thrown carelessly into the >chart analysis nowadays at the expense of the incredible riches of >our tradition or as a substitute for careful analysis.
I agree with you that we need not lose the sense of hierarchy in dealing with the multifarious additional factors that can be introduced into the chart analysis. But I do not agree with you in holding that the conception chart is irrelevant. How can it be irrelevant when it contains information about your vehicle, for example the sex of your body, that cannot be otherwise easily obtained from the natal chart ?. Alice Bailey talks about how the esoteric astrologer should pursue his research to obtain the horoscope of his/her entrance into the Human Kingdom, because in that chart you can read about how many lives you will be reincarnating as a human in this planet. But about the chart of conception, I believe that soon we'll develop software to reliably find our conception charts with real precision. That is the true chart of our physical vehicle, and in it is possible to learn the time of death with greater ease than from the birth chart. Although at the moment we don't know them, there must be ways to derive other charts from the natal that do have the information that the natal does not easily provide.
>>From: DR GONZALO PENA TAMEZ >>Well you are actually throwing three different balls at us, >>aren't you? > >I wouldn't say "throwing", rather, gently rolling them towards >you;)
Well I wasn't sure whether it was base-ball, soccer, or soft-ball...But anyway, now I have dropped my bat.
>>About the level of consciousness in the chart, I'd rather think >>that to every snapshot of heavens there corresponds a >>consciousness quantifier, whose fluctuations in time are given >>too, within the chart. It is just that >>to every chart there is a moment of death implicit in it. If no >>human being >>was born with that chart, then still you can say "If a human >>being had been >>born at this time and place, then he/she would be dying at this >>other date". Of >>course if no one was born at that time and place then there is no >>one to die >>at this other time and place, right? Of course, knowing your >>future opens tha possibility of changing it, by taking proper >>action at certain times. But still, your chart tells you now when >>again you will die, if you do nothing about it.=20 > >>In this context I must say that I don't believe there is any >>information about a person that may not be accessed directly from >>the natal chart, given >>a sufficiently expert astrologer. > >Perhaps "any information" is a little strong. For instance, you >can't tell what my grandmother's maiden name is or what type of >flowers I have in my bedroom and how many there are of them, from >the chart alone. Please understand I am not being flippant. We can >derive a great deal of information from the chart, whether it be >natal, horary or mundane (I was given a good example the other day >- William Lilly's horary chart for "fish >stolen" is masterful. He described the thief's figure and face >exactly, and the place where the thief lived then he captured the >thief and retrieved the >fish!) but we cannot describe "reality" since that is bound to be subjective >nor can we describe a whole human being. Oh, we can talk ABOUT the >person and have a good picture of their psyche but one cannot >_f_u_l_l_y_ describe a person.
In practical terms, you are right, we have great limitations as to what amount of detailed information we can get from the chart. Your example of the stolen fish and Lilly is a good one. Often I am able to baffle my clients with surprising details of their past that I fish out from their chart.
Because I recently posted about it in another board, it comes to my mind the case of a woman who had her initial session with me and I had never seen her before. Her chart was coming out of the printer still undone when I suddenly asked her "did your husband lost his right hand index finger? She freaked out immediately and said "Yes, before we got married, when he worked with a lathe, but how did you know that?!"...I said "Well, because you were born with the South Node of the Moon at 03=B050' Virgo (True Node) peri-partile conjunct the mid-point of a tight Sun/Mars square, in House 7, when the Sun rules your 7th". That didn`t mean much to her since she didn't know any astrology, yet to me it was very clear. Because experience has shown me that the hands are signified on the ecliptic in the arc from 0 to 5 Gemini Virgo and from 25 to 30 Gemini and Virgo, while the best key words to qualify the South Node of the Moon include "gone, dissapeared, lack of, absence of, missing" ...so the South Node just before 4 Virgo meant that the 4th finger, namely the index, was missing....but it had to be her husband's because it was in 7th and the Sun, ruler of her 7th was semisquaring there along with Mars that was square the Sun. It was easy to know it had to be the right hand (Mars, Saturn, Sun) and not the left (Venus, Uranus), and so forth. The interesting point here is that her husband lost his finger before she met him. Had she come to see me when she was single, I'd have told her she was predestined to marry a man missing his right index finger. When I posted this story in the other list, a lady replied saying that she has her natal Saturn at 4 Virgo and her mother lost her finger; her father-in-law lost 4 fingers in front of her and she had to dispose of them, and recently her daughter lost her finger as well. But I'm getting off the point, which is just what are the limits of the information you can get out of a chart. What I am saying is that there is no limit other than the astrologer's ability. I don't see astrology as a finished or closed science, I see it as the egg of a science about to hatch. If a hundred years ago we had been talking about the limits of the amount of energy that humans can release from a device, all you could think of is a big locomotive engine. Decades later the atom is split and a locomotive engine is nothing. Now they talk about the quark bomb that splits the virtual quarks in the quantum void and liberates unmaginable energies creating an unimaginable explosion that self propagates forever in all directions even in the void between galaxies. So I'd say the physicists are getting beyond limits now as far as relasing energy. I foresee we will see the end of life in this planet by the year 2013, when the Uranus/Pluto square that brought us World War 2 returns in heavens. Just like a few years have made all the difference as far as expanding the limits of what is humanly possible as far as releasing energy, I am convinced that in a few years, when the egg of astrology hatches it will be obvious that the limits of quantitative knowledge of the future tend to infinity. Predicting fractal equations, like Terence McKenna's Time Wave Zero that predicts novelty in the world, or the Elliot Wave that predicts the fluctuations of any economic curve, are already a reality. Soon astrology as we know it will be unrecognizable, because we are working on mighty mathematical ways to predict the future in quantitative terms and with great accuracy.
>Please define "astropsychobabbling". I'm not sure what you mean.
I call astropsychobabbler any practicioner who is unable to predict the future from the chart but nonetheless has come to master the lingo of astrology and blends it with psychological jargon to counsel his clients. The main characteristic of the astropsychobabbler is that he subscribes to the notion that astrology is basically a tool for spiritual growth and self knowledge as well as a symbolic language. I have no more interest in astropsychobabbling than an atomic physicist has in building a dam or a bridge. To me astrology is the only possible core of any objective epistemological system. Astrology is the only discipline that has the germ to transcend the limitations to human knowledge of reality impossed by time and space. Astrology has nothing whatsoever to do with counseling your clients, because astrology is a pure science, and whatever use you make of it is but technological application of astrological knowledge, but not astrology itself. Blasting an atomic bomb is not nuclear physics, and the goal of nuclear physics is not making atomic bombs. Similarly, anyone who believes that the goal of astrology is giving better readings to his clients is entirely missing the point. I give readings to my clients every day, and try to help them through my knowledge of astrology, but that's secondary when we are talking about the essence of astrology.
Hoping to continue these discussions, I thank you for your kind attention and remain...
Attentively
Dr. Gonzalo Pena Tamez
Astrologer
Unless otherwise indicated, articles and submissions above are copyright © 1996 -1997 their respective authors.
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