about astrology

"I think we all feel great ambivalence at the sight of our own horoscope. On the one hand we're proud to see that the sky is imprinted on our individual life, like a postmark with a date stamped on a letter - this makes it distinct, one of a kind. But at the same time it's a form of imprisonment in space, like a tattooed prison number. There's no escaping it. I cannot be someone other than I am. How awful. We'd prefer to think we're free, able to reinvent ourselves whenever we choose. This connection with something as great and monumental as the sky makes us feel uncomfortable. We'd rather be small, and then our petty little sins would be forgivable. Therefore I'm convinced that we should get to know our prison very well."


The passage above is taken from Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, best book I've read this year. In the book the protagonist is an old lady who is an amateur astrologer. She uses a lot of terminology of astrology. So in order to really understand the book I started to learn about astrology. Like the true Sagittarian that I am.

I learned how to read birth charts, the twelve houses, the planets, sextile, trine, and all that. Perhaps to no surprise to anybody who had properly tried to learn about astrology, I found the reading of my birth chart to be eerily accurate. I read several of my friends charts and got even more fascinated. About two years ago I had also learn some basic of Chinese astrology, bāzì, which is based on Taoism. Chinese astrology, like the western one, is also based on reading someone's specific birth date and time. I had also found the reading to be accurate.

Now of course we can argue about what accuracy here means. What we tend to do is to ignore the bits we don't identify with and mark the ones we like as accurate. In bāzì, as in Taoism, there are two things that make us who we are, the things that are inherently given to us by the heaven, the universe, and the things that happen to us and what we do on earth. Basically the nature and nurture concept. So in a way I think there's no way a reading can be 100% accurate because of the life that happens to us, but there are certain things that are specifically our given characters. 

I don't agree with all the results but I can tell that my birth chart reading is distinctively mine and the readings of other charts are definitely not me. I found things I had never realised point specifically to me. This is the one important thing I learn from astrology. That people are different. It isn't a new profound thing to discover but it's one thing we often forget. That everyone is wired differently. We can't expect people to have the same mindset as we do. I myself am often disappointed when I find people don't have the same conviction as I do. 

Astrology of course has been trivialised with the popularisation of horoscopes on the golden age of magazines, turning it into the oversimplified twelve zodiac that really doesn't mean anything and therefore became object of mockery. I might sound like I'm taking astrology very seriously, but I really don't. No one claims astrology as science. People who understand the concept of astrology often says that it's very much a self therapy. I think I agree. It helps me understand what ticks me and what fuels me. And why those things don't necessarily work on other people. It is frustrating sometimes that I am frustrated about things that don't frustrate others at all. As Tokarczuk wrote on the quote, our selves are our prisons and whatever helps me understand my prison is welcomed. 

Aside from astrology there has been a lot of efforts to create human classification both psychologically and physically, the MBTI (which I don't care about at all), the enneagram, the blood type psychology, etc. There are also certain classification of body types and colour analysis that classify people based on physical appearance. I found many of these to be helpful. Aside from the physical classification which we can directly see the analysis, I do believe there is a certain order of the universe in which biological and psychological are somehow related. I don't necessarily believe that the planetary alignments in the sky the minute we were born determine who we are. But I am open to the possibility that there are some celestial orders we may never understand.