On Astrological and Geomantic Houses

[sdi]

Geomancy borrows houses from astrology, but I think there's an interesting and important difference between them. Astrology is, in some sense, objective: the stars are the same for everyone, and there is one (and presumably only one) correct way to read them. Consequently, it is essential to understand and apply houses in an objective way. Geomancy, by contrast, is subjective: it isn't about understanding the cosmos, it is about communication with another being. Anything goes, as long as you and they agree on it.

So I think it is okay to have an idiosyncratic understanding of the geomantic houses, as long as you and your geomantic spirit share that idiosyncratic understanding. Before I do any geomantic reading, I always negotiate my house assignments with my geomantic spirit in prayer: perhaps three-quarters of the time, they accept my proposal; but the rest of the time they recommend I use a different house, and I think my readings are the stronger for it.

Comments

[barefootwisdom]

Thank you very much for the good food for thought here!

I’m not sure the distinction between astrology and geomancy is as sharp as you make it out to be.

While it’s certainly true that at any given moment, the stars are where they are, in a way that does not depend upon us in any way, the astrological houses, by contrast, have quite a few personal and subjective elements about them.

There are at least two types of personal elements in astrological interpretation: the position of the Ascendant (and related considerations in horary astrology, such as the particular time when a question is asked, and for which the chart is then cast), and the choice of house division. The former is “personal” to the native, the nation, or the querent for whom the chart is cast, while the latter is “personal” to the astrologer, as she uses her best judgment—along with, in many cases a generous helping of intuition and inspiration—to understand the relation of macrocosm (the celestial sphere, and the positions of the bodies therein) to microcosm (the person or nation in whose life those influences are to find a particular, concrete manifestation).

I’ll leave aside the first group, and focus on the parts that are “personal” to the astrologer.

First and foremost, we are confronted with the relativity of house divisions. While the stars themselves are where they are, the houses are drawn quite differently by different astrologers, to the point that a planet might be one, two, or (very occasionally) more houses away, depending on whether the houses are based on whole signs, on equal 30° divisions from the Ascendant, or any of the various quadrant-based methods (e.g., Placidus, Regiomontanus, etc.). And yet astrologers who prefer different house systems nonetheless manage to make accurate predictions, even about the very same nativity, or the very same mundane ingress.

No astrologer, no matter how talented, will ever see the entire picture of the entire, larger macrocosm. It’s just too all-encompassing. There’s too much there for any of our human minds to comprehend in a single glimpse. (And even if, in some mystical rapture, we did attain a moment of such total comprehension, human language would be too frail, too limited, too woefully narrow and particular, to express in words everything that we had seen.) And so the astrologer will focus on certain relevant or salient points, to the exclusion of many other things that are also written in the stars. She will form queries according to a particular question, a particular interest.

Nonetheless, it’s quite possible to be simply wrong. No matter how you stretch it, a superior square from Mars will never be pure, unbridled joy and bliss, free from all conflict or tension. It just doesn’t work like that. Sure, that superior square from Mars can play out in quite a variety of ways, which may be more or less unpleasant or unwelcome, more or less difficult to deal with. The conflicts may be productive, the tension may resolve to the querent’s benefit. But they will still be present in some form. Put another way: each planet has a core range of significations—where the notions of “core” and “range” are both critical to a full understanding. There is a common core, however hard to fully capture in words, that delimits or restricts a planet’s significations: there are boundaries, such that a planet can’t just mean anything at all. And yet there is a genuine range, within which different aspects of a planet can become more or less apparent, more or less significant, more or less important, in any given context.

And to return to our starting point, there is yet another place for what looks very much like an intuitive or inspired element in astrological practice. I know of well-respected astrologers who use more than one house system. This might look like “cheating,” but at it’s best, it can be an honest reflection of the fact that they, like any of us, cannot see the whole picture all at once, through any single lens. Any house system we choose will inevitably obscure certain features while revealing others. So the choice of house system in any particular case can, at its best, be a function of genuine intuition, or a result of inspiration from (or dialogue with) the astrologer’s higher self, guardian spirit, or patron deity, who watches over the work.


Now let’s bring this back to geomancy. There is a (relative) objectivity to geomancy, and of the geomantic houses. Here, I note the relative frequency with which geomancers ask each other for help, or for a “second opinion” in interpreting a chart. Even when interpretations diverge—as they often do, to whatever greater or lesser degree—we seem to get enough from such collaboration to keep on doing it, which in turn suggests that, to whatever degree, we’re speaking more or less the same language. In other words, our idiolects are not sufficiently divergent to prevent mutual intelligibility!

Apologies that this comment got so long-winded, and so much longer than your original post itself! I’ll be posting an edited (and further expanded!) version of it over on my own blog, since it really turned into an essay all its own. Thanks for the inspiration!

[sdi]

Excellent! Thank you for writing this all out, and don't apologize for being long-winded, I very much enjoy reading things like this.

Reflecting upon this, I'm starting to wonder if there's something weirder going on than astrology being a point somewhere in the middle of an objective↔subjective continuum... If astrology weren't strictly objective, then what do we make of Gauquelin's findings? But, on the other hand, if astrology weren't strictly subjective, then how could one get meaningful results from using conflicting house systems? (Or, further, how can one reconcile the fact that the Mars effect is strongest in the cadent IX and XII houses, where generations of astrologers have found planetary effects to be weakest?)

So I'm wondering if astrology is, at once, both objective and subjective; that is, not a point somewhere between the two, but somehow encompassing the entire continuum. What would that mean? What would that imply? I'm not sure! (In fact, I'm not even sure if I'm not just twisting myself in a rhetorical knot, here. I'll have to think it through for a while.)

Still, your point is taken. I see you have by now posted the longer piece you mentioned on your blog, and I'll take a look as time permits!

[sdi]

I've been meditating on this, and hit upon two things.

First, there's another way that this duality can be resolved, and that's that both astrology and geomancy are purely subjective. Subjectivity doesn't necessarily imply that results aren't repeatable. If an artist paints the same scenes over again or uses the same techniques over again, does that imply that their art is objective? Of course not, it simply shows their preferences. Perhaps our world simply enjoys astrology (or any other set of physical systems) working the ways it does, and so expresses it in matter and personalities and so on over and over to explore how it plays out in all its many combinations.

Second, we are taught that there are objective phenomena (natural "laws", physics, chemical processes, etc.) and subjective phenomena (the mind, personalities, the arts, etc.); but this need not be so. We can't readily dismiss subjectivity, but if the universe is a Being and simply repeats itself for the fun and interest of it (and not because "that's the way it works"), then we can (and, by Occam's razor, should) dismiss objectivity as being part of our model of the universe.