Damian Sharp was born in Australia and was the recipient of two Literary Fellowship Awards from the Australian Council for the arts. He is also the author of Simple Feng Shui and Simple Chinese Astrology and has published short stories in periodicals such as the Chicago Review. He lives in San Francisco.

CHAPTER 1

The Horoscope and the Signs of the Zodiac

Astrology is both a science and an art. It is a symbolic representation of all of theelements—religious, spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical, invisible and visible—thatexist in the universe and come together in diverse combinations that account for individualhuman beings and the forces that shape and act upon them. We are microcosmsmanifesting the macrocosm, an ancient concept set forth in the Bible as Man made in theimage of God. Astrological interpretation relies heavily on an informed intuition and afamiliarity, gained from practice and time, with the complex and multilayered meaningsunderlying its seemingly simple symbology. Interpreting a horoscope is partly science,partly intuitive discipline, and ultimately a synthesis of both. The particular reading willreflect the personality and outlook of the astrologer in much the same way as apsychologist's analysis is also colored by his or her personal views.

Astrology tells us that as individuals we are peculiar and particular, while at the same timea direct manifestation of a cosmic whole to which we are inexorably linked. It reminds usthat we are bound to the karmic wheel, that we come into the world with special gifts aswell as certain burdens and travails. On the surface it can appear to tell us that ourfortunes and our personalities are preordained, that our fates are completely in the handsof the gods. But a man's character is his fate, the Greek philosopher Heracleitus tells us,and in the end there is no disguising or excusing who we are.

Correctly understood and applied, a horoscope is a precise instrument based on realforces, events, and relationships occurring in nature. It is, most importantly, a diagram ofan individual's purpose in life and a symbolic language that describes how differentfactors—signs, planets, and houses—are combined to produce a meaningful whole. Eachhoroscope is a complex combination of factors, a graphic depiction of a particulardetermining and synchronistic moment in time and space when the bodies of the solarsystem form a unique pattern. The art of astrological analysis lies in intuitivelysynthesizing all the relationships in the horoscope to create a complete and integratedpicture or profile.

In reading any horoscope, it is important to remember that the energies symbolized by theplanets and signs represent birth potentials that the individual may or may not choose toactualize in the manner described. Age, sex, socioeconomic conditions, education,environment, spiritual development, and many other factors contribute to the ways inwhich we express our natal energies.

Astrology does not preclude personal willpower, selfdetermination, and dynamic actionupon those very forces that seem to have cosmically preordained who we are and whatwe are to become. What it presents us with are the lessons we need to learn within thisparticular turn of the Great Wheel, along with our innate potential, in order to become andultimately be. How well we learn these lessons and gain from them is up to us asindividuals. We are all, in a sense, Odysseus using all of his courage, guile, strength, andwits to defy Poseidon (the god of the sea), of whom he'd made an enemy, in order tosimply get home. How well the lessons are learned is not the responsibility of the teacher,who simply presents them for what they are and moves on. It relies solely on theintelligence, receptivity, perception, and tenacity of the pupil.

Constructing a Horoscope or Astrological Chart

You may find it useful to obtain a horoscope for your time and place of birth so you canlearn the principles presented in this book by studying your own natal, or birth, chart.Constructing an individual horoscope is a fairly complex process, involving precisecalculations, the exact time, date, and place of birth, latitude and longitude, an ephemeris,a table of the houses, a list of time changes, and other tools. In this day and age,however, there are many Internet sites and computer software programs for castingastrological charts. Several books on casting techniques are also available, among themAlan Leo's Casting the Horoscope and Margaret Hone's Modern Textbook of Astrology.The American Federation of Astrologers (AFA) also puts out an excellent series of mathhandbooks.

The Origins of Astrology

In our earliest art, that of the Upper Paleolithic, between 32,000 to 12,000 years ago,depictions of the heavens, of the Sun, Moon, and the stars, are totally absent. Our remoteCro- Magnon ancestors were not stargazers beyond an awareness of the moon and itsphases, depicted, perhaps, in bas-relief cave carvings of women holding bison horns withthirteen incisions and as marks on antlers and bones found on the cave floors. Thesepeople were basically earthbound in their preoccupations, concerned with their immediateand animistic world. For them, magic and power resided not in the sky above, but in theearth, in deep caves in which these ancient artists chose to render, by the meager light ofcrude lamps and small fires, remarkably beautiful, sophisticated, and accurately detaileddepictions of the fauna that both sustained and threatened their existence: aurochs, bison,horses, ibex, and reindeer; mammoth, rhino, lion, and the cave-dwelling bear. Thesymbolic meaning beyond their naturalistic representations spoke of the creatures'inherent personalities and attributes, as well as a host of abstract ideas associated withthem (like speed, agility, courage, strength, nurturing, fierceness, cunning). Chineseastrology is in part based on this kind of observation. What did these creatures representto our ancestors, who knew and observed them so intimately? It does seem that theimages on the cave walls are not just the beginning of art, but the beginnings of writtenlanguage, visual symbols drawn from nature conveying meanings beyond their simple andmundane representations.

The deep cave is the realm of the shaman, of the vision quest, of the underworld wherenature's mysterious power, the miracle of existence itself—birth, being, death, andregeneration—reside. It was the role of the shaman-artist to penetrate this dark realm ofthe invisible and make contact with and capture this power, conjuring the animals andtheir attributes from out of the living rock in which their spirit-essence dwelled and snaringthem as though art was the hunter's trap. The creation of these magnificent works of artwas usually part of a form of ritualistic magic.

With the end of the...