The Art of Interpretation

On The Art of Interpretation
c. by Wendy Z Ashley, October 2009

Astrologers as interpreters of symbol belong to a small group of artists. Indeed it is artists working in literature, image, film, theater, dance etc whose task it is to present meaning to their audience through symbol. Of course the interpretation of symbol as images is also the task of the psychologist as dream interpreter.

There is a very wide range of images to be found in the artist’s symbols and she will either choose the symbolic elements she feels may best or most completely convey the ideas she wishes to express in her medium, or, she may be herself so taken by an image, a symbol, that she has no choice but to deepen it or expand it. Just bring to mind the work of Georgia O’Keefe as an example.

Those two other interpreters of symbols, the psychologist and the astrologer, must attend to the symbol as it is given. And where the psychologist must pay attention to a very wide range of images as they appear in her client’s dreams, the astrologer interprets the symbolic meaning of the planets, the sun and the moon, the Signs of the Zodiac, and in a few cases, the stars.

What is really extraordinary about the practice of astrological interpretation is that as an art it has a very long continuation going back at least a few thousand years, and that its symbols are cosmological in nature, in fact the astral bodies ARE in themselves facts of nature.

When astrology began to lose its standing in learned circles, during The Enlightenment, we switched from a concern for the ‘meaning’ of the astral bodies to a recognition of them in strictly factual terms, such as how big, how far, how fast, and whether they were inhabited or habitable. The planets, sun and moon and stars became objects for us and whatever in them was worthy of attention as vehicles for divinities, if not divinities in themselves, fell away. The heavenly bodies became simply ‘objects.’ When we were assured by scientific authority that our own bodily experience of a rising sun, or a ‘full’ moon with the concomitant symbolic meaning of “a new day” or a “magical night” was hogwash it was then that we began to lose the archetypal validity of our own experience. When we learned that the earth that we experienced as the base of all our cosmological witnessing was not the center of the cosmos but that instead it was the sun that was the hub of our solar system and we were but the inhabitants of a minor planet, we lost our place in the universe. We, and the world we stood upon, were demoted. And our experience of our universe was but a delusion.

In science, unlike art, objects in themselves do not possess meaning. For some time some astrologers felt that there might be some means by which astrology might satisfy the scientific community as to its validity. The use of a statistical method to prove astrology’s validity appealed to many. And marrying the outcast astrology to the more respectable psychology seemed a means of putting the older practice up a few notches. This did win a few converts once astrology began to be seen as a descriptive language only incidentally related to the skies.

As astrologers we should remember that the tension between astrology and astronomy has a very long history and in the time of Galileo astrology had the upper hand and astronomers were getting the official disapproval. If the shoe has been upon the other foot for a while we should not be surprised.

There have been some astrologers inspired by astronomical facts to apply them to astrological symbolism. Some have suggested that because the moon gives no light of its own that the moon astrologically represents a false self, where the sun because of its light giving power must represent the true self! This sort of extension of association is a part of astrological method but here it fails because it does not take the scientific symbol of the light of the sun far enough. If the sun has its own light and the moon’s light is merely a reflection of the sun’s then it must follow that all things which shine by the sun’s light – all things which do not give off their own light must also be false. This of course includes the earth and most everything on it as well as the moon. It must include every other planetary body as well. This means that the sun and ONLY the sun is truth! This symbolic sun would be valid if in a culture in which there IS only ONE truth, so it might serve religion rather than science, and an extreme, existential monotheism at that. But that won’t work either because there ARE other lights, not only the stars which we know to be other suns but I speak of the most primitive of these natural lights besides lightning, and fire. No I speak of animals which give off phosphorescent light, fireflies being the one we are most familiar with…
not the whole bug, just its rear end. By an extension of the truth vs. false premises we must assert that existential solar “truth” may be known through the behind of a bug!

Of course nowadays we have electric lights, lasers, and the red hot glow of heated metals. Is the burner on your stove any closer to the truth than what is in the darkness under your couch?

See what I mean? It’s coo-coo. Because by the logical extension of those who interpret only the sun’s light to be ‘truth’ then it must follow that ALL non self illuminated objects are ‘not truth.’

Here-in lays the astrologer’s dilemma. In order to interpret astrological symbols one must know how to approach the symbolic object through the world of myth, not science. Indeed the earliest interpretations did not deny facts but the facts they admitted were those universally experienced for millennia by the body. It is the body that is the center of our experience. To doubt it is to deny the self!

For example; when seen with the human eye, the sun and the moon are of nearly equal size. In addition, when the moon is as “full” or as round as the sun, it shines throughout the night, equivalent to the sun that shines throughout the day. Although the moon may be seen in daylight although it is then very pale, the sun is never seen at night. Therefore the Sun, mythically, became the Lord of Day, and the Moon the Lord of Night. Therefore Day and Night are two different experiences – opposite but equal in value. The Protestant ethic does value day – as the hours of productive work – as the more to be valued, but try telling a modern medical practitioner that the time spent in sleep is not to be valued equally with working hours!

Sometimes the one IS more to be valued than the other! It is their nearly equivalent size that is a factor in the earth based phenomena we call eclipses. Periodically we see the Sun blotted out as the Moon passes in front of it, and likewise we see the Moon grow dark when the Sun is opposite the Moon. (Of course we know now that it is the Earth’s shadow which darkens the Moon.) This phenomenon was so striking to the ancients that they actually found the mathematics of the cycle ages ago!

In all cultures around the world there are stories about the relationship of the sun and the moon! Let us take one very sophisticated understanding from the Greeks. They had three primary Sun - Moon pairings. The first pair was Helios and Selene were simply personifications of the two as ‘planets’ or as objects. The second pair was Apollo the Sun and Artemis the Moon. They stood for a whole raft of associated polarities like the civilized world vs the peasant’s world, the city vs the country, the educated vs the instinctual, and men vs women for starters. Most instructive was the pair of divinities celebrated at Apollo’s chief shrine Delphi. For 9 months of the year the Sun God Apollo was in residence there. Apollo the Sun is Logos. For the other three months in winter when the Moon dominates the sky it is the Moon God, Dionysus, who rules the site. Dionysus the Moon God is Mythos. Logos is ‘reason,’ and Mythos is ‘story.’

Of course the Sun and the Moon are the most prominent visible astral objects in the sky. Astrologers accordingly place great emphasis upon the signs and houses where an individual has her Sun or her Moon. There is some astrological difference of opinion as to which body is the more important.

Some, in a like mind with those who attribute “truth” to the Sun, vote for the Sun as more truly the Self. To those who take this point of view, the Moon would then stand for a false self, or a mirrored self, or a purely imaginary self.

Others, by an extension of the Yin and Yang of the two bodies, believe the Sun to be more important in a man’s chart, and the Moon to be more important in a woman’s chart. Most modern astrology defines the Sun as male and the Moon as female, but not all cultures coincide with these attributions. Most cultures of peoples who inhabit the far north reverse the association. They imagine the Sun to be female and the Moon to be male. Are they simply wrong? Of course not. Nor does it mean that astrology as practiced in the west is invalid for people born in Japan. Maybe we should simply adjust an astrological reading for someone from Siberia or Japan by denoting the Moon for the Father and the Sun for the Mother.

In very early modern astrological practice the Sun was said to dominate a daytime birth and the Moon to dominate a night time birth. This actually works pretty well up to a point. If the individual is born at sunrise or at moonset or during an eclipse, then the rigidity of the rule breaks down.

What does work then? What rules need to be followed so that an astrological interpretation rings true? I think all astrologers who are honest with themselves have had the experience of the client reacting with a “No that’s not me.” “No that’s not me.” “No that’s not me.”

Sometimes if the astrologer is usually competent and capable this reaction may come about because the birth time or date is off. Occasionally the client simply does not truly know herself. But in my experience astrological practice can sometimes be simply insufficient to the task. As astrologers we need to be less limited by the kind of certainty that comes with a lack of understanding of the mythic underpinnings of our art. And we need to understand the complications of the variety of effects of a given symbol’s shadow side, both bright shadow and dark shadow, of a given symbol’s place in a culture, a place, and in a history. And we need to recover some of astrology’s ability to uncover archetypes within a client’s life and experience and not presume that it is all psychological. And we must be careful always to present the symbols as having multitudes of possible manifestations rather than attempting either to concretize its meaning or to presume its form.

If we can do that then we will not be at all surprised when a client born with the Sun and Moon conjoined in Gemini and with Leo rising informs us that she shows dogs for a living, and that her best friends growing up were the family’s two poodles, Snowball and Licorice, brother and sister, who were show dogs. Yes she is a success but her own brother is in the slammer for fraud. She’s the family hero and he’s the family scapegoat. Etcetera. By the way, you should know that the two Dogs in the sky are under Gemini. They are Canis Minor and Canis Major. And when conjoined to the Sun, the Moon is Black.