I have been in love with astrology since 1979. I had somehow gotten my hands on a copy of Grant Lewi’s classic, Heaven Knows What. The book was mostly a “cookbook” — the word for astrology books that have paragraphs for planets in placements, so you can turn to page 176 and read what your Venus in Leo might mean — but in the back, Lewi had included an ingenious method for a layperson to figure their own chart out.
This was something revolutionary for the time (revolutionary in the seventies and exponentially more so when the book was first published in 1935.) Now it’s a simple matter to figure out your natal chart on hundreds of free websites, but back in 1979 you had to visit an astrologer or face a very steep learning curve to find out anything past your Sun sign.
Lewi included a barebones ephemeris in the back of his book and instructions on how to put your planets into a natal wheel divided into 36 sections — what I now understand to be the decans of the zodiac, though Lewi kept everything as simple as possible and never used the word “decan” anywhere in his book.
Once you had all your planets in place, you could cut out a disc with a triangle and another with a square. Lining one of these discs up with a planet would show you if anything else in your chart was in trine, square, or opposition. Using the decans as his orb of influence made for a sort of brute force astrology, but very workable for a twelve year old kid whose life was a saturation job of everything magic and new age, tarot and astrology, walk-ins and space aliens, cryptids and walking trees. I was devouring everything related to Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. The future seemed very far away. A future where anything was possible.
And here we are, living in the future. Many things seem locked up tight, but I like to pretend anything is still possible. I want to be pleasantly surprised.
From that beginning, I remained on astrology’s fringes. I continued to devour ideas that circled around astrology: Jung, mythology, alchemy, mythopoetics, eddas, music theory, Mircae, Layne Redmond, astronomy, poetry therapy, entheogens. I explored life and it explored me right back.
I came back to the level of fascination I’d had when I first cracked open that Grant Lewi book at some point along the path and dug deeper. Astrology software emerged: mostly text-based and clunky at first, but the Swiss Ephemeris was good and the data was good. I’ve watched software grow up around the bones of astrology and flesh out into useful tools, often beautiful tools.
I decided to do an apprenticeship in astrology and ended up studying Archetypal Astrology for a year with Adam Elenbaas, who now specializes in a more Hellenistic form of astrology, still with his keen insight and deep wisdom. I was scheduled to continue for a second year, but that small inner voice told me I would work with astrology, but not doing personal readings. I listened to the voice and shifted directions, still wondering how the pieces fit together but trusting the process.
And here we are, with Mercury Muse. I love writing as much as I love astrology. I couldn’t choose: they are twin loves. And they feed each other. Contemplative writing and methods of divination are on the same wave. Inspiration floats in the air. Gilbert writes about the way artists pluck ideas from … nowhere? in Big Magic. The randomness of divination feeds writing. Writing thrives on strangely unnecessary constraints and unexpected interior tour guides. I’ve got a lot more to say about that when I talk about Writing and Me.
This is some of the history of how astrology followed me into Mercury Muse.
I now use whole sign houses, because it works best for me with the ways I use astrology to feed my writing. I do not demand that anyone else use any particular house system. They are all good. Use the one(s) that sing(s) to you.
I don’t do the 13 sign zodiac because it destroys the mathematical symmetry of astrology as it’s been practiced for thousands of years. The magic of the number 12 is important to me and to the ways I am inspired by astrological archetypes. Use Ophiuchus if the serpent is singing to you. My stuff is built on a twelve-sign tropical zodiac. And yes, I recognize that it’s all backwards for folks in the southern hemisphere and I apologize for the focus I have on astrology.
That said, I’d love to learn more about southern hemisphere myths and magic and astrology based on the skies down there and the way the shadows move across the moon. I’m always up for book and video recommendations and would love to learn about southern hemisphere astrology as it is or was practiced. I’ve also looked a little bit at India’s tradition of sidereal astrology and find it fascinating … though I’m still a tropical astrologer because that’s a comfort spot for me.
I have some myths of my own, built from my own dreams and thoughts and observations, so do know that I’m not judging people who do astrology differently from me — just talking about how I do things. I’m very open about different ways of doing astrology because the stars, the universe, the natural world, the patterns of the movements of all things — I don’t own these things. If you see something in astrology that I don’t see, you are not wrong. It’s there. You see it.
And that’s how I approach the stars. With equal parts reverence and levity, as an oracle of what is, as a gift the universe brings, as a breath of inspiration that can touch my page and bring out words I didn’t know were inside me until I saw them written down.