The main purpose of any church, in my opinion, is to help bring everyone closer to God. Many different churches have their unique orthodoxies on how they guide people to do that. Unity of Divine Creation Ministry takes a slightly different approach to the same goal. Our position is that as individuated expressions of God, each of our connections are expressed in ways unique to us, and that an overly consistent and/or specific approach may not be the best way for the greatest number of people to cultivate their personal connection to God.
As part of our ceremonies, I have been giving a very brief astrological overview of the sign that the new moon is taking place in and then walking people through the transits as they pass through the next lunar cycle. The nature of doing a 'community reading' or 'weather forecast' like this is quite superficial. Nonetheless, the reason that I have chosen to do it is because astrology has had a major influence in me coming to understand myself and my place in things and helped me cultivate my personal connection to God. So I write this article with the intention of giving a brief overview of the basics of what I was taught in astrology, how that has taken place for me, and how it can do the same for others.
To begin, in a somewhat cliche manner, I want to start by saying that before I learned astrology properly, I was a huge skeptic. I have always had a penchant for mystical things so I never discounted it completely; but at the same time probably more than half of what I saw being presented related to astrology was inaccurate or nonsense. I knew my sun sign and was doing things like reading the horoscopes in the paper or listening to "professionals" talk about it but never went so far as to pick up a book and see what it was all about for myself.
This changed for me when I was searching for education related to alchemy and found a course that offered something I had been researching. The course had a threefold focus in astrology, spagyrics, and Buddhist practices and it was a Vitalistic Healing course intending to train students in these areas to understand how to diagnose dis-ease and suggest remedies. I was interested in spagyrics, not astrology, but my greatest takeaways from it and the courses and meetings I participated in during the following years were all related to astrology. The astrology that I was learning was Vedic astrology and that is what I use in our ceremonies.
Studying my own natal chart after learning some of the basics is what blew the doors open for me on what astrology was really about, and helped me further cultivate my personal connection with God. Our natal charts show us the position of the planets when we were born. Taking into account the ascendant, or rising sign (which is the sign that is on the horizon when you are born), astrological houses are also overlaid on the signs in the chart which provide deeper dimension of information at our disposal. This requires us to know where we were born along with the exact time, which most of us can get from our birth certificates.
Using software, we can input this information and it will display a chart to us. From here, we can see what signs each of the planets were in when we were born. We can also see the ascendant, and figure out which signs the houses are in, and which planets are in the houses. The way that I was taught was that the sign that the ascendant is in is the first house, and from there the rest of the houses follow. Most software can also give us this information without us having to count for ourselves.
Side note: different schools of astrology may have different methods they follow. Some may have houses starting from the ascendant and spanning multiple signs; some may have different size houses as opposed to each house being the same size. Still, many things are generally accepted throughout all schools such as the planets that rule each sign and their general dispositions. So what I'm saying here isn't gospel, it's just the methods that I was taught when I started.
A framework I like to use to describe the interaction of these different elements is to think of the planets as people, the signs as land, and the houses as realms of experience. Each planet has a personality, interests, and focus areas. Many mythologies do a good job of describing this for us. Mercury has been described as a messenger, Venus as a sensual beauty, etc.
The signs and houses are VERY closely related but with important subtle differences. If we use my example of thinking of a sign as land, each piece of land has its own properties or is a terrain with features that anything placed in it will experience. The sign of Leo is described as a sign of pride, confidence and self-respect, while Scorpio as transformation, change and rebirth. Each sign also has a lord or ruler which is one of the planets or a luminary (the sun or the moon). The Sun is the lord of Leo, Mars rules over Scorpio and Aries, Venus over Taurus and Libra, and so on. The houses as realms of experience have general themes that correspond to them. The third house commonly relates to communication and the intellect, while the seventh house is commonly known for partnerships, relationships and desires, for example.
One way I find useful to think of the subtle difference between houses and signs based on the examples I just gave is that the house is the realm of experience happening on the terrain or land of the sign. Let's take an example of two people living next to each other in a city for several years. They may have a completely different experience because they are there for different reasons. One may live there temporarily to go to school, while another may be there for work or because of a partnership. Both people are in the same place and will have the experiences of the terrain, but the realm of experience through which they filter things is completely different. So while they will share some experiences based on being in the same place, they can still have a lot of differences because of the filters through which that experience goes. Another way to look at it is that the doctor's office for me as a patient takes an entirely different meaning from the doctor's office for the practitioner that works there. If we were each asked to describe our experience there would be a lot of similarities but they wouldn't be the same.
There are also similar overlaps between the planets and the signs since a ruler of sign may have significations shared with it, such as Mercury and Gemini both sometimes being associated with communication. Or Libra being about relationships and also Venus, its ruler. So, there's plenty of overlap here with subtle differences - which contributes to making study and understanding of astrology both an art and a science.
So, from our natal chart we now have the planets (people, personalities) in signs (places) which a house is also placed (corresponding to different realms of experience). The myraid of possible combinations leads to unique experiences even if people share many similarities in their charts. With just this basic information from our natal chart we can extrapolate this to tons of different things to understand and study.
Let's take an example using a chart that has Scorpio as the ascendant and Mercury in Gemini. If Scorpio is the ascendant in the chart, it is the first house and that makes the eight house Gemini (or we could say that the first house is IN Scorpio and the eighth house is IN Gemini). Since Mercury is the ruler of Gemini, this could be considered an auspicious placement. With Gemini and Mercury both sharing the signification or theme of communication, and the eighth house as one transformation, maybe the individual with a placement like this will have experiences in life where their communications lead to transformative experiences. And the auspicious placement of Mercury in a house it rules may mean these things come easy and bring benefit rather than being overly challenging or bringing suffering.
For another quick example let's do a chart where the ascendant is in Cancer and we have Mars placed there as well. Cancer is Mars' sign of debilitation, which means it is a challenging placement. Mars is the ruler of Aries and Scorpio. In this chart, Aries is the tenth house and Scorpio is the fifth house, so Mars is considered the ruler of the fifth and tenth houses. The tenth house is commonly associated with people's careers while the fifth house relates to creativity. So this placement may combine those elements and the individual may have a career involving art. The challenging placement of Mars in Cancer may mean that this person has a lot of challenges to face in their career. With these examples we can see how these things start to combine and play out.
With all of the overlap there's always a lot of different angles to look at to find out different things about ourselves. Let's consider the question, if Mercury, Gemini, and the third house all share the theme of communication, should I look at them all to figure out things related to communication? Or is one of the more important? Well the answer here is that it's different for everyone. To start, one want to look at all of them. Then, after studying our charts and taking time to reflect and meditate on what we are seeing in the chart and how we experience things in our lives, we can start to discern which one is playing the most significant role in our lives. Once we start to figure these things out and understand the patterns, we can develop greater understandings of ourselves.
When we have the placements in our natal chart, we can then start to study up on what some of these different significations and correspondences are, and see if there are similarities between them and the actual experiences we are having in our lives. I chose to give very 'external' examples because I think they're easier to understand for beginners, but we can also study this to compare them to our inner thoughts and dispositions on things. With a bit of meditation and practice to understand the self, we can start to find and pick out how the interplay of these things results in our own inner experience as well. This is the foundation for using this information to help cultivate a closer connection to God. I find it easier to look at the external things first to understand the general idea, which can then help reveal for us the inner meanings - although other people may have their own way of coming to understand it.
Once we educate ourselves on these things and start to make a practice of it, it gives us a whole new perspective on our selves. We may start to understand why we behave certain ways or are predisposed to having certain thoughts. Being able to see these patterns can help us feel like we are closer to God and understanding the universe around us. After all, God has set forth laws that govern creation, and one of the best ways for us to tune into this and feel closer to God is to observe and understand the patterns in Nature.
We're going to stop this article here because there's a lot to unpack there and if one is actually interested in using astrology as a method to cultivate an inner connection to God it's best not to go too far down the rabbit hole at the beginning. But, there's tons more to go by here. I didn't even talk about the elements (fire, earth, air water) and their relation to the signs, or orientations (cardinal, fixed and dual), or even more importantly, the transits. The transits are really the focus of the little reviews that I do in our ceremonies, and I plan on writing another article for those to include as part of our ceremony for the new moon in July.
Resources
For anyone interested in learning more about astrology, and using it as a tool to strengthen their connection to The Divine, I have a few resources to share. Obviously I'm going from my own experience here originally learning Vedic astrology. An excellent book for the general overview, where you can learn about the planets, signs, houses, and their interrelationships is Path of Light Volume 1 by James Kelleher. That link is to purchase it from him directly where you can get it for only $38. It's a 400+ page textbook - so incredibly worth every cent. The software that I use is called Jagannatha Hora and it is free. For almost everything I've learned that has a feature for it, and there's tons I've never used. There's also dozens of websites that can be found by using a search engine that provide charts for free. For those interested, my teacher was Willa Keizer. That is a link to her site where she offers readings, but at the moment she is not offering course work. And, last but not least, if anyone has any questions please create a topic in our community forum! We're here to support our members, and although I am certainly not a professional I love introducing people to this information because of how much it has helped me. So please, join in and ask away!
You can now read part 2 of this article.