New Astrology for a New Millennium

Without much fanfare or public notice, a new astrology has emerged over the last half century. Called by various names—humanistic, psychological, choice-centered, transformative—this new discipline focuses on self-awareness and creativity. It rebirths a dynamic profession whose aim is to help us claim greater freedom, empower our wills, heal from traumas, build communities, and develop a deeper, more spiritual understanding of who we are and why we’re on this planet at this time in history. Indeed, the emerging new astrology parallels a new consciousness being born with the new millennium.

The basics of transformative astrology differ from the old days when many astrologers assumed a Stoic fatalism (though, to be accurate, some still do). The new astrology begins from four different premises:

1) The future is fluid not fixed.

2) What we do has an impact on the present and the future.

3) Who we are as well as what we do has an impact on human consciousness.

4) Planets symbolize our character rather than cause it, turning transformative astrologers into counselors instead of prophets (or readers of doom).

The first two premises of transformative astrology reflect an emerging understanding of time not as fixed and linear but as shifting patterns of movement, like a huge river. Time includes whirlpools and eddies (time-loops), currents running next to each other (parallel time lines), and rivers that run north and south (time moving “forward” and “backward”). Each of us participates actively in how this time river flows—both on personal and collective levels—so that, contrary to media pictures of us, we’re actors in the time drama, not passive victims of events.

Following these two premises, transformative astrology offers ways to look at our lives expansively, inviting us to see the big picture. With its colleagues in pioneering psychology and psychiatry, the new astrology identifies the character tools we need to build fulfilling relationships and healthy cultures. Predictions that once sounded like deterministic pronouncements now sound like weather forecasts: these are the general conditions—what can you do with them creatively?

I want to emphasize the prediction point particularly, because it’s the most misunderstood. Recently a client said to me that her significant other didn’t “believe in” astrology because it was just suggestion. Since, as Kim Rogers-Gallagher writes, astrology is not about belief but understanding, I wasn’t sure what this significant other meant. Then it dawned on me: he assumed that astrology makes deterministic predictions, which come true only because they function the way suggestions do in psychology or hynotherapy.

But the new astrology doesn’t work this way. It talks about trends of development the way we talk about changes in the seasons. To illustrate, I’ll make a prediction now: this year, from September through December, it’s going to get colder, the leaves will turn colors and then fall from the trees, and all of us will be forced indoors to get warm. And this shocking state of affairs will go on at the end of every year for decades, even millennia. As psychological astrologer Noel Tyl says, not only are we not afraid of cycles of development, we depend on them every day, from circadian and seasonal rhythms to our daily and yearly schedules. During the 1999 drought (which continues as I write), we’re even depending on a hurricane season.

In our daily lives, we’d feel lost without our knowledge of cycles. Astrology wants us to understand these cycles more precisely and deeply—e.g., on levels of meaning and personal development as well as social change and consciousness evolution. Though it sometimes sounds as if astrologers are making deterministic predictions, what they’re really trying to do is clarify some trend.

In fact, if astrologers were to adopt the forecasting styles of meteorologists, they might say something like, “With Venus going through your fifth house, there’s a 70% chance of a widely scattered love affair or of making an existing relationship-front more fun and romantic, an 80% chance of showering more quality time on your kids, and a 100% chance of your shining more creatively in general.”

The third premise of the new astrology—that we each have an impact on consciousness by virtue of who we are and the choices we make—defines astrology as a tool for enhancing self-awareness. Though we’re accustomed to therapists, counselors, and even practical philosophers helping us with developing our self-understanding, astrology has taken this role for millennia.

In its self-awareness role, astrology acknowledges with pioneering humanistic astrologer Dane Rudhyar that the birthchart symbolizes what the universe needs right now. We’re called into being, and our birth charts tell us specifically which qualities and potentialities were called in. Given this perspective, the job of astrologers is to help us find and claim our role in the cosmos, translated to here and now, to our own personal “work in progress.”

The fourth premise grounds the previous three. Whereas the shift from Newtonian physics to relativity and quantum physics challenged simplistic ideas of causality, the new astrology challenges simplistic ideas of influence. Even if some physical relation can be found between planets and people, all it will prove is a relation not a cause. If we discover some planetary radiation we don’t now know about, all we’ll know is that the universe is interconnected in ways we haven’t yet defined—and that’s not news to anyone. In this context, humanistic astrologer Zipporah Dobbins likens astrology to a clock. It tells the time, but it doesn’t make the time.

The fourth premise, by the way, allows the new astrology to make peace with both religion and science. St. Augustine’s ancient objection to astrology was that deterministic predictions took the place of prophecy and denied God’s will. Since astrology emphasizes symbols (and this is what Augustine wanted—an astrology of just “signs,” as he writes in City of God), it can’t fight with religion on this point. Famed astrologer Robert Hand quipped that if you can find a genuine prophet who knows the will of God, you don’t need an astrologer.

This fourth premise also gets astrology off science’s “superstition” hook. Scientists have always worried that astrology claims planetary influence, as if planets cause behavior. But British astrologer Geoffrey Cornelius cornered astrology’s most vocal critic at a conference recently and asked, “Would you be okay with astrology if it were just a poetic interpretation of the sky?”—a symbol system devoted to exploring meaning and how it operates in our lives—to which the critic assented. Though few scientists noticed, the war ended at that moment. For transformative astrology, it’s been over for half a century.

For the new millennium, the development of a discipline such as astrology, with its emphasis on meaning and self-awareness, is exciting. In astrological terms, a striking configuration of outer planets in early 1997 signalled the end of old ways of thinking. People were shaken up. In mid-1998 to mid-1999, a traditionally “tense” relationship between Saturn and Neptune symbolized a shifting into a neutral gear. Our personal values and our work lives were tossed into the air, giving us a time of confusion or disorientation. The value of being in neutral, however, is that it gives us time to contemplate which gear we want to shift into next.

In symbolic terms, Neptune’s water seemed to wash away our Saturnian sense of reality, structure, and authority. For instance, newspapers gave us pictures of the Presidency that we had never seen before (and sometimes more than we wanted to see). For many of us, deaths and separations forced us to question how we felt about the dimensions of reality—the relation between what’s here and what’s on “the other side”—while new physics once again presented us with supersymmetry theories that demand ten or more dimensions just to make the math work (Columbia University’s Brian Green, for example, spent the summer lecturing on superstring theories in his book, The Elegant Universe). Remember the “Question authority” bumper stickers? The Saturn–Neptune square was the time of questioning authority and reality and all the values that went with it.

Then came the famous August 11, 1999 solar eclipse, creating a grand cross of planets in the sky, particularly Saturn squaring Uranus, which would continue through the year 2000—the old giving way to the new. Many metaphysical groups noticed the “cross in the sky” symbol and called for the birth of a new consciousness. Moreover, the cross occurred in the four fixed signs of Taurus (Saturn), Leo (the solar eclipse), Scorpio (Mars), and Aquarius (Uranus), corresponding to the four figures of the Gospels—the Bull or Ox, the Lion, the Eagle, and the Human or Angel—all of which heightened the sense of something profound at work, shifting our foundations in a more spiritual direction. The new astrology was out in front, calling for this higher meaning to the eclipse symbols.

True, going back to Nostradamus, there have also been the predictable predictions of catastrophe around this particular stellar event. Some may even come true, considering that astrologers allow a three-month to three-year orb on either side of the eclipse date. The weather forecaster who suggests that this year’s hurricane season will see a killer hurricane may get it right without thinking that the future is predetermined. Similarly, astrologers know that power structures all over the world—governments, corporations, and criminal organizations (often indistinguishable from each other)—may engage in all sorts of shenanigans, some of which may find their way into media-reported public attention.

But for human consciousness, the millennial-portentous “cross in the sky” has an impact on us all: it symbolizes a new consciousness being born on the planet—that is, if we’re open to it and prepared to be good midwives to it. With the grand cross, we’re given a set of symbols, and we can use them any way we wish. This is what the new astrology aims to explore.

Power structures do what they do. Nature does what it does. These are facts not predictions. The significant question for us is: what do we do? What choices are we making? What shall we do with the energies or higher consciousness doorway symbolized by this eclipse?

During the last six thousand years of recorded history, we’ve watched aggressive societies march up and down the globe, spawning wars and oppression. We’ve also seen humanity respond with brilliant philosophy, great art and music, astonishing love stories, and even alternative cultures that were peaceful and harmonious. Now we have an opportunity to claim an entirely new culture, using the “crossing” symbols as guides. We can work to heal the wounds from wars and oppression, using humanity’s individual and collective talents to create a new century of healing. We can reclaim the planet and humanity, using our own higher consciousness and values.

To do this, we need as big a picture of individual and collective cycles and processes as we can get—which is what the new astrology is designed to do. It wants to help, paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln, to bind up humanity’s wounds and move into a future dedicated to peace and justice, allying itself to every other discipline that wants to aid humanity in creating the brightest millennium it’s ever seen.

Using the new astrology and every other tool we can get our hands on, we can craft a culture that uses the best of old and new to create a unique event—an awakened humanity celebrating its highest gifts and talents. That’s a prediction that can come true, because all of us together can make it so.