Like then, tensions are running high and the state of our democracy feels a little perilous. I am reflecting on this as I sit down to write about the Mars retrograde that begins next week, and on the column I wrote about the previous Mars retrograde in the fall of 2020. We cannot recognize something we have never seen before and we can never know exactly what form it will take this time around.Īstrologer and cultural historian Richard Tarnas wrote, “astrology is not concretely predictive, but archetypally predictive.” By this he means that astrology can reveal core patterns of the psyche and the type of experiences it is likely to be drawn to, but not that marriage will happen on such and such a date, or that you will lose a job here, or eat the perfect taco on a specific Saturday in 2043. Without this repetition, prediction would be impossible.
Much in the same way that seasons repeat in definite order, though they are never quite the same, planetary alignments recalibrate at regular intervals, donning new forms while maintaining a similar archetypal core. Despite buzzwords like “portals” and “lion’s gate” and evolutionary language, astrology is essentially the study of cycles that repeat themselves. One of the things about astrology, as with life, is that if you pay attention long enough, eventually it is just the same stuff over and over again.
