Mark Jones Astrology Blog

In his inspirational book The War of Art, writer Steven Pressfield describes the moment he stopped running away:

“I washed up in New York a few decades ago making twenty bucks a night driving a cab and running away full-time from doing my work. One night, alone in my $110-a-month sublet, I hit bottom in terms of having diverted myself into so many phoney channels so many times that I couldn’t rationalize it for one more evening. I dragged out my ancient Smith Corona, dreading the experience as pointless, fruitless, meaningless, not to say the most painful exercise I could think of. For two hours I made myself sit there…”

Now, the reader, primed here by the aphoristic style that Steven has developed in his self-help books (ostensibly books about how to write, but actually books about how to live) thinks this is a lead-in to the story of how he created his great work. But no…

“I made myself sit there, torturing out some trash that I chucked immediately into the shitcan. That was enough.”

A depressing situation perhaps: I can certainly imagine some inner voice arising: “all this time and all you finally produce when you actually try is rubbish!” - a voice that if listened to would confirm all at once the very worst fears about oneself. Isn’t this very crisis why so many of us never try at all?

“A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual…”

A is for Astrology: Sign, Signal and Symbol in the Natal Chart

Symbols are not signs. Signs tell you where to go. For instance, how many miles from Portland to Seattle. Signals warn you of something – workers in the road or fog ahead. Astrology searches for signals, and as often as not, misinterprets them as signs.

Symbols are multivalent. Their whole point is that there is no single point or meaning. Symbols then point to many meanings but are not that meaning. The Cross, for example, speaks of sacrifice but it is not a mere equivalent for sacrifice.

Symbols enrich us most when we participate in their life through the co-creation of their meaning. We bring something to a symbol that we do not to a sign. That attitude or orientation which we bring to a symbol is the most appropriate when we encounter the natal chart of an individual - an individual whose value and significance is irreducible.

Ordinary language is, in these terms, a system of signs. When you ask a friend to meet you at the bookstore you are not speaking symbolically; your friend does not have to decipher something to get hold of you later that day!

“A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual…”

In this quote from his essay The Undiscovered Self, Carl Jung is making an impassioned plea for the meaning and purpose of the individual as distinct from the mass statistic of the human population.

It is not that Jung is against community. Rather that he sees true community as made up of individuals. The essay, written in 1956, finds Jung already concerned with the reality of nuclear weapons and the cold war as well as the impact of totalitarian regimes on Eastern Europe. Jung felt that it was the essence or “quality” of the individual that stood in the way of the loss of human freedom.

He continues, “But if the individual, overwhelmed by the sense of his own puniness and impotence, should feel that his life has lost its meaning – which, after all, is not identical with public welfare and higher standards of living – then he is already on the way to State slavery and, without knowing or wanting it, has become its proselyte.”

A question is a departure point for a profound journey into meaning; a leap into the mystery of life's meaning. This is how I like to see the natal chart. Too often though, a hurt or frightened part of us wants an answer - and if possible, straight away!

This need for answers, whilst legitimate in many practical situations - for instance, needing to find out what the mechanic thinks is wrong with our car - can be an expression of fear or hurt in our deeper life experience. As if all of our existential fragility and pain could be reduced to a single tangible piece of information. We believe that this information is somehow locked in our chart. If we just had the key...

It seems to me that often we astrologers pride ourselves in finding an answer. Years of study and much specialized knowledge goes into being able to predict an event or life change or to position an experience of the individual in some way only through using the chart. This is often the kind of material used to showcase or somehow prove or validate astrology.

The ex member of the band Blondie, Gary Lachmann, has been writing readable books for a number of years now - on various alternative thinkers from Jung and Steiner to the more occult Madame Blavatsky and Jacob Boehme. In his latest work Beyond the Robot he explores the work of writer and philosopher Colin Wilson. Wilson's great point was the very part of us designed to make day to day life easy, the automatic part that could take care of driving or idling in a boring meeting was actually threatening the full vitality of our life experience. He records the elation that the depressive youthful Graham Greene had when he played Russian Roulette with himself and survived. He records the last minute reprieve of Dostoevsky from a firing squad and the vigorous sense of life purpose that coursed through him afterwards. Wilson argued we needed to consciously remember these moments of extraordinary significance and let them elevate our lives.

I met Wilson at the Cheltenham Literary Festival in the early 1990's when I was an undergraduate. My friend and I had self-designed a course on modern poetry that a professor has kindly agreed to teach us. Wilson was teaching on what he called Faculty X - the mysterious extra factor that the Occult world explored. This helped my friend and I clarify the nature of the mysterious heightened state that some poetry would achieve; that we had become so interested in. The mystical thread held in the best poetry that we would ultimately follow back to its origins in spiritual experience and teachings.

by Mark Jones

Originally published in The Mountain Astrologer

The fact that the Moon has nodes is commonly taken into account by astrologers. What is not always known or understood is that all the planets have nodes. The essence of astrology is found within the ecliptic, since the circle of the zodiac itself is formed around it. Because the apparent motion of the Sun forms the ecliptic, it is the only body in the solar system that does not have a nodal axis.

It is important to emphasize that there is no thing found at the north or south node of a planetary body; it is instead an abstract point in space that marks the intersection of the motion of the planet as it crosses the ecliptic. When the planet rises above the ecliptic, this forms the ascending or north node, and when the planet falls below the ecliptic, this forms the descending or south node. (See Figure, at left.)

During the Uranus–Pluto conjunction of the mid-to-late 1960s and very early ‘70s, Theodor Landscheidt initially presented a paper (1965) and then a workshop (1971) on the nature of the planetary nodes. In 1971, Dane Rudhyar published a pamphlet in the Humanistic Astrology Series: The Planetary and Lunar Nodes (CSA Press). During 1973, Dr. Zipporah Dobbins, who had attended Landscheidt’s workshop, published The Node Book (TIA Publications), which included her reflections on the planetary nodes.

Now, during the waxing First Quarter square of Uranus and Pluto, it seems an opportune moment to assess the importance of the revolutionary idea of the planetary nodes as originally presented at the onset of the current Uranus–Pluto synodic cycle. In the intervening decades, the recognition of the nodes’ importance — with some exceptions, such as the teachings of Jeffrey Wolf Green — seems to have slipped from collective awareness. I believe that the significance of the planetary nodes is worth our while to acknowledge at this time.

by Mark Jones

Originally published in The Mountain Astrologer

The ideas presented in this article are meant as a commentary on the nature of two people coming together for an astrology reading. In exploring psychotherapeutic ideas for astrologers, I am not arguing for a psychological astrology, that is, a psychological method as the underlying astrological approach. This article is designed to introduce core insights from the world of depth psychology to assist the astrologer of any technical persuasion to understand some of the issues and dynamics that can arise when any two people meet for the purposes of guidance or healing.

An astrology reading involves a counselling dynamic. It sounds simple, but there is an underlying radicalism to what I am asserting: that regardless of your astrological approach — traditional, evolutionary, psychological, Vedic, medical, etc. — when an individual consults you for advice, help, and support, a therapeutic relationship comes into being, if only for one hour.

Furthermore, this is the case whether or not the client (or even, for that matter, the astrologer) is conscious of it. An astrologer may feel that they are simply disseminating their specialised information to a client; however, there is still a counselling dynamic that will stir certain forces within the client’s — and, potentially, the astrologer’s — unconscious. The reading may not occur in person; it may be recorded or in writing. Nevertheless, it includes a counselling aspect to the relationship.