My relationship with the stars started early, though not in the form of astrology.
From a very young age, I have been fascinated with myths, symbolism, and stories, particularly those coming from Egypt and ancient Greece. Not very patient and with a constant curiosity, I taught myself how to read early on so I could read stories on my own. In many of these tales, the characters would end up being commemorated in the form of constellations. Looking at them in the night sky always brought me a feeling of awe.
Despite this, I rejected astrology as being valid for many years. Growing up in Romania, where general superstition is widespread, this subject was present not only in newspaper columns, but casually thrown into conversations. My skepticism came precisely because I associated it with superstitions which made no sense: that people could be divided into 12 categories, each of which will have similar experiences during the course of their lives.
However, I found esotericism and ancient religious thought very captivating, as well as psychology and the understanding of the human mind. Both of these roads lead inevitably to Carl G. Jung’s work, whose ideas absorbed me. It was as if someone had read my mind and articulated it much better than I could have. Though not very public about it, Jung mentioned astrology in many of his works, as he found it a reliable method of character analysis, and a synchronistic method of forecasting.
Still, it was not something I delved deeply into until some years later, when a serious health crisis brought me back to studying spiritual traditions. From medieval grimoires to Plato, astrology kept being mentioned, but it wasn’t until I started studying Qabbalah that I decided to give it a chance, as I realized that it was a language I needed to understand for being able to truly grasp occult philosophy.
After the initial shock of finding out the vastness of the material: centuries and centuries of knowledge, techniques and methods, I felt both attacked and stunned at the precision with which it was describing my character. This was no “you will meet a tall, dark stranger”.
This was describing my obsessions and my anger outbursts, my idealism and inability to be content with something done half-way. The way I talked, the way I learned, the way I thought, and the way I loved, everything was here. This helped me immensely in coming to terms with both negative and positive characteristics.
Realizing that this is the meeting point of all my interests, and that extensive research has been done in recent decades especially in correlation to psychology, I was swept away. I spent the next years keeping diaries of daily transits in correlation to my birth chart and what happened in my life. I saved and looked over every chart I could get my hands on, doing readings for friends and family, and paid professional astrologers to read mine.
Some hundreds of hours of furious note taking and listening to experts later, I decided it was time for a certification course, so I took one with Renn Butler, who has been a student of both Prof. Richard Tarnas and Dr. Stanislav Grof for Archetypal Astrology and Psychedelic Integration.
Though Archetypal Astrology is a potent tool, I found it to be somewhat fragmentary as my background was already inclusive of some Hellenistic techniques which I noticed to work very well in relation to the modern approaches. This led me to take Chris Brennan‘s certification course in Hellenistic Astrology, as well as some workshops with Austin Coppock which have helped me merge ancient and medieval knowledge with modern beliefs and everyday practice. Currently, I am enrolled in Austin’s 3 year education programme.
Astrology, though my greatest passion is not the only one. My interest in all things strange has inescapably led me on the path of reading cards, which is in fact a more mathematical art than most people would think. Thanks to the now extinct Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn the fact that the tarot deck is structured on the zodiac and its decans is widespread knowledge. Finding the correlation between these and my diaries has been both a source of constant entertainment, as well as a great compass for how to act for years.
Both of these practices are part of my daily ritual and they have proven time after time to be amazing tools for both self-knowledge and understanding events, not only for myself but for people close to me.
