Does Astrology Describe “Signs” or “Causes”?

I will answer the question, but you will have to endure some culture lecturing first.

A topic of perennial debate in the history of astrology as it has been transmitted through various regionally dominant cosmopolitan imperial overcultures is whether the motions of the planets describe “signs” — that is, indications of the Divine Will, with which human beings can interact and negotiate, as the most ancient astrological cultures held — or “causes” — that is, physical forces that exert more or less inexorable effects on things “below,” as later, more science-brained cultures have held.

Many interesting variations in astrological practice and ethics fall out of this debate, and I celebrate how astrology’s cultural fluctuations between different periods and places that fall on different parts of this spectrum have expanded the field.

I’m not terribly interested in the history of the debate itself, though, because a far more important point that is typically entirely missing from discussions of it among contemporary astrologers — coming from the flat internet-mediated monoculture that many of them do — is that the cultural fluctuation is the important part, and that this isn’t a matter of deriving some theoretical philosophical solution that will settle the matter once and for all.

I know that’s what imperial overcultures like to do, which is how we got universal theoretical philosophy in the first place, and why people started applying it willy nilly to things like cultures and astrology and wound up with goofball ideas like “theology” and “metaphysics” and other time-wasting hobbies an overculture with excess capital extracted by conquest can spend it all on. Standardizing human experiences with philosophy makes humans with different experiences much easier to subjugate.

But I digress.

Actually, no, that’s the entire point. I don’t think it’s to be expected that different people will find satisfying alignment on such things. That expectation itself is an imposition. It reflects a belief — which is to say, a particular cultural construction mistaken for a fundamental truth — that all of reality can be reduced into a universal explanation that happens to be tractable to a particular culture. In order to believe that, you have to recognize yourself as not being from a particular culture but rather being a Universal Human, which is a false thing that dominant imperial monocultures believe about themselves during some peak period before they exhaust themselves and die, as all living things do.

My own answers to questions like “signs vs. causes” are clearly and undeniably derived from my own cultural inheritance, which I feel comfortable applying in my own astrological practice because people from whom I am culturally descended were present for and contributed wisdom to the core projects that produced the synthesis now known as Hellenistic astrology in key places and times such as Hellenistic Alexandria.

Moreover, despite sectarian misgivings about divination or fate-vs.-free-will questions that may have arisen within Jewish cultures at various other places and times, the underlying resonance with the Jewish cosmos that can be achieved in the practice of “traditional astrology” with the proper cultural adjustments cannot be denied; it would be ahistorical to do so.

So it should not be surprising that it is possible for practitioners of “traditional astrology” to practice differently from one another when cultural differences in their relationship to reality exist, as has been the case since the very beginning and is arguably the condition that catalyzed the creation of such a culturally flexible divination system.

Surely you can imagine that when Greeks, Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and Jews were living in relative harmony in Alexandria and environs, comparing notes on the cosmos, and searching for the shareable techniques that would become the corpus of “Hellenistic astrology,” there were some spicy agree-to-disagree moments in the room about whether planets are “gods” or not.

You may think of this as a separate — perhaps superficial — disagreement from whether or not astrology shows “signs” or “causes,” but it isn’t. It’s inseparable. We can agree all day long about what correctly practiced astrology shows without agreeing why, and personal and cultural differences in why are no less than the human interface to this system, reflecting our natural places in the cosmos, which are evidently different from one another. Look around.

Anyone who has studied the medieval Islamicate astrological tradition understands this. Differences that could be described as “theological” — but which I would prefer to just call “cultural” — can be pointed out at the root of radically innovative new techniques of and uses for astrology built on the same inherited platform of significations. The greatest works of Jewish astrology hail from the same period for understandably similar reasons.

The basic shareable teaching here that matters to me is that people need to be able to coexist while experiencing different answers to these questions.

Astrology is impressive as a tool for coordinating across different answers, which is surely why it was created.

I guess another way of putting that is that surely, inasmuch as it is for communication, astrology — the logos of stars — is a language, which is a structure of signs. But does that mean those signs are therefore not signs of causes? Of course not.

Okay, Taal, What Is Your Own Take on “Signs” vs. “Causes”?

I have many ways to talk about this, but I will not talk about this in non-Jewish ways for the sake of making people who talk about this in other ways more comfortable, though I am always honored and happy to compare notes.

These views do not come from the “theory” part of my experience. I am not proposing something, I am merely trying to put my direct experience into words that someone whose experience is not reliably similar enough to mine can understand.

It’s also important for me to disclaim that, in putting my view into my own words, I am not granting permission for this to be taken as The Jewish View of Astrology™. While I frequently do argue this to Jewish people as A Jewish view of astrology, perhaps in order to complicate their own Jewish view of astrology because it excludes me, I request that you leave definitive statements of what Jews believe for Jews to make and get mad at each other about.

I simply seek to explain to you that my own views of How Astrology Works™ are grounded in my own experience as a Jewish person.

So.

The way I experience reality is, it’s the way it is for incomprehensible reasons or non-reasons, having to do with the workings of a realm that is not accessible from here, but that realm is what gives all form and action to this realm (causes) and also interacts dynamically with this realm (signs).

Someone Up There has deigned to tell us what’s going on Up There in ways that can be comprehended down here by studying the ways of everything.

That’s very hard to do and requires advanced practice and discernment even to do the comprehension part. But it also turns out that we can express things about how we’d like it to turn out, but only in that same language about the ways of everything. That is, our prayer and petition to the Divine has to be consonant with how everything is. We can’t impose on everything with things that only work on our scale.

When things do not go my way, I do not blame the planets. In general, I find it diminishing to my human agency to blame anything. Rather, I begin to wonder how I can be better prepared next time.

When things do go my way, I do thank the planets, as I thank everything else in my environment, and ask them to join me in thanking our Creator for letting it be this way.

I do not recognize the planets as gods.

Or rather, I do not recognize “gods” as independent, particular beings.

I have cultural problems with that word “god,” which I also believe has cultural problems for its root culture. Not that those cultural problems have not also been the root cause of cultural problems in my culture, which could do with some healing.

It is more culturally resonant for me to recognize what other cultures call “gods,” and still other cultures call “angels,” as “messengers.”

Reality, as I encounter it, is the Message of Messages.

Everything is a sign.

And causing is only true from relative perspectives, which is what Einstein taught us.

The “Unmoved Mover” is a thin and mechanical concept, from my perspective.

But I place my faith in the One who moves.