I first met the artist and astrologer who we will here know as The Jeane Dixon Effect at a gallery in Manhattan. I have loved astrology since childhood for its beautiful articulation of how chance becomes fate, but I’m not a systematic thinker so I never quite got to grips with its full potential. The Jeane Dixon Effect, unlike me, has a rigorous understanding of the huge spatiotemporal organizing principle that we call astrology. On hearing just a few facts about my chart, she narrowed her far-seeing eyes and calculated my year of birth. I was very smitten. Love astrologer www.vashikaranladyastrologer.com For TNI’s Stars issue, I finally got the chance to talk to her more fully, via email and Skype. The fate or telos written into my chart is to be vulnerable in public, so it’s OK for my name to appear here, she said, but publicity isn’t her thing. I say this to convey the seriousness of her approach and also to make you understand that this isn’t just someone I’ve made up. Astrology is a strange practice with, as far as I can tell, no real basis in fact, but almost every day I am amazed by what wise and kind people can do with it. While we were working on this, The Jeane Dixon Effect sent me a question of her own, which I was supposed to answer alongside hers. The question was, “Why do you think the stars care about our little revolutions?” My answer is, as always: the unit of measurement of the universe is a human life.
Some people think that astrology is deterministic and puts people in meaningless boxes, but can it also be expansive or even liberating?
Astrology is not trying to trap you. It’s really more about holes, and all your ways out. When I read a chart, I look for every option and one of the biggest things to keep in mind here is that the chart you’re born with is always moving. This is super-reductive but maybe it’s helpful to think of astrology as a clock. You can take a picture of that clock and say it’s 4:20 and some odd seconds or whatever, but the clock is still ticking and you could later take another picture of another time. Astrology is like a clock with 10 hands or even more and not all the base ratios are the same. For instance, the moon takes roughly 28.5 days to go around the chart and Saturn takes roughly 28.5 years, but other planets are doing other things. At any point in time—say the time of your birth–from any given place, you could take a picture and that would be your natal chart. So you get all these planets as your signs: your moon sign, your Pluto sign, etc. And all of these are still in motion. Then there are the signs in the houses, and the aspects they make between one another. And all of it is in motion at different rates, making new compositions. An astrological chart can even keep on going when you’re gone. Every now and then I like to see how somebody is haunting the planet. You know, look up how my ancestors feel about the internet.
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