“Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes.” — Carl Jung

        The key to understanding how astrology works is in recognizing that the chart is alive and changes as we do.   This can sound irrational at first but is actually quite true as an evolutionary process.  The planets, signs, and aspects each possess particular archetypal qualities that manifest in different ways as we grow. The best example of this dynamic is our own lives.  As we grow into our lives our experiences shape us and this ability to learn changes how we see things, both past and future.  The same is true of charts:  As we mature the chart responds by revealing ever deeper layers of meaning because our perceptions have changed.   In fact, astrology itself as a discipline has followed this same process.  Over millennia it has evolved from its beginnings as a way the ancients tracked the stars to guide their agricultural practices, to a method used to advise monarchs wanting to influence outcomes in their realms, to its current ability to bring light and agency to our psychological world.   Astrology has changed as we have evolved in our understanding of what it can reveal and thus how it can be used.

         Though our charts have this unique ability to both reveal and respond to our circumstance, astrology isn’t predictive.  It won’t tell you who you should marry or where you should go to school, whether your mate will leave you or when your grandmother will pass away.  What it will give you is greater awareness of your ability to choose how you want to engage with life.  It will reveal the specific resources you were born with that you can use to navigate your experiences.

        Archetypes are universal, recurring patterns of human behavior and character that appear across cultures and history. Because they are ancestral, that is, from an original root, all humans share them.  Dr. Richard Tarnas, arguably the father of archetypal astrology,  defines an archetype as “a universal principle or force that affects, structures, and permeates the human psyche and the world of human experience.  One can think of them in mythic terms as gods and goddesses.”   Primitive humans lived instinctively with these “gods” and “goddesses”, experiencing the world as enchanted by unseen forces from which they took direction and comfort.

        This mysterious intelligence—the archetypes—are subtle patterns in the psyche that are often inaccessible to the mind but are understood by the soul.  Archetypes function as storytellers that connect soul with mind, revealing innate dynamics that we don’t normally perceive.  The soul's messages can be found in the chart as planets—the archetypal gods and goddesses—that converse in complex ways using signs, houses, and aspects.  All of these combine to influence how the archetypes uniquely shape our responses.

Fate vs. Destiny

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate”.

        Psychologist Carl Jung’s statement defines fate as an independent force within us that seems to act autonomously to create events.  He also suggests that if we become aware of our psyche’s nature and its archetypal needs, we become co-creators of our circumstance through the power of choice, which changes fate into destiny.  In other words, the difference between fate and destiny is consciousness.  Destiny then becomes a condition of living life in a way that allows us to create our own outcomes according to our truest nature.   Becoming aware changes situations from “things that happen to us”, to events over which we have sovereignty. Viewing astrology in this way allows us to access the archetypes' tools to create our lives from our inner authority,