Star-Talk & The Re-Animating of Time
Bringing Time 'Back to Life' in The Modern World...
The First Time I ‘Truly Saw’ The Night Sky
Like most modern people, I grew up in a city in which the night was ‘guarded’ by an army of street lights. One effect of this protective legion of artificial lights is to shroud our eyes from the heavenly lights of the night sky, which effectively dulls, blunts or downright blocks the stars from our perception.
It is a common experience for city dwellers to be blown away by the sheer majesty of the un-illuminated night sky when they go into the country or wilderness for the first time, and look up after the sun has fallen below the horizon for the evening. It is quite a stunning sight.
I spent a decade living in the high desert mountains of New Mexico (a place known for its awe-inspiring skies), where the closet street light was an hour away and was often caught by surprise at how radiant an undisturbed night sky could be.
Yet, not once did I really ‘see’ the stars. I ‘saw’ them, but did not ‘ truly see’ them, for at the time, my perceptive capacities were still not as awakened as they needed to be. City life has a way of ‘shutting down’ the ability to perceive certain kinds of subtle phenomena, and it certainly had for me, even during my time in the wilderness.
It took years of engaging in a variety of practices that specifically ‘opened’ perception like ‘Primordial Alchemy’, and ‘Activating Ancestral Intelligence’, for me to notice that the night sky is actually pulsating and breathing, and when I did, it blew me away.
Stars are radiating pulses of light our way. They shimmer. They twinkle. They oscillate and radiate rhythmically. Their light is not steady like a flashlight, but are more akin to a type of symphonic brilliance dancing through space-time. As the eminent jingle goes:
‘Twinkle twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are
Up above the world so high
Like a diamond in the sky
Twinkle twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are’
Now, to express how wonderful this is, I must comment on another common theme for modern people, which is very tight eyes.
We squint at computers, phones, and TV screens, and rarely have our depth perception or peripheral vision truly opened. As a collective, we tend to look straight ahead in a narrow bandwidth of vision. This impacts the way people perceive the night sky.
In this state, we tend to ‘look at’ stars and are unable to ‘take in’ the night sky. This was the case for me too, until one particular auspicious night.
On this night, I looked up and my vision softened, and broadened, yet somehow it was more focused and lucid than ever before; I was able to take the whole sky into my field of vision and saw that all the stars were twinkling, and pulsating at once.
The sky was breathing, rhyming, and humming as one unified whole. This was immediately followed by a sense of awe and connection to the Deep Ancestors who have been watching the night sky for eons of time.
It was incredible. It was the first time I truly saw the night sky.
The Ancestors and The Stars
The Ancestors sought to understand, map and relate to these blazing balls of light since time immemorial. In a very practical sense, they were used as a literal map, and helped them navigate through the physical world. Sans GPS, modern maps, or compasses, the stars act as directional markers.
However, as with most elements of the ancient world, rarely were the practical and spiritual separated out in quite so ‘clean’ a way.
When many ancient peoples looked up, they did not just see ‘stars’ in a materialistic sense, they saw the heavens, they heard the stories of the gods, and they ‘noticed patterns’.
Since the first time I saw the night sky, I have wondered if the real genesis of constellations is that these ‘star shapes’ are actually resonating in similar rhythms; so that perhaps the constellation of Capricorn is akin to a ‘star song’ telling a story of sea-goats.
The Ancestors did not have the lights of TV sets to watch at night, but stars…and they watched them for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, with curiosity.
I may be wrong, but I have had this vision of ancient tribal astronomers and astrologers (the same thing in those times), what we might call ‘star-watchers’, segmenting the sky into pieces, and like a hive mind, these groups of people would be responsible for remembering ‘their part of the sky’. Of course, then, the sky changes over the year. So together they would dialog, share the patterns they noticed, and discuss the changes. In this way, a group of people could track the changes.
One thing is certain...The Ancestors truly saw the night sky, and at a depth that most of us will not be able to approximate in this lifetime. If the systems of astrology left behind by ancients are any inkling of what they felt when they saw the sky, then to look at the sky is the witness to the Will of the Heavens.
Heaven’s Will and The Sacred Art of Astrology
Modern pop astrology, or what some astrologers call ‘trash astrology’ has progressively eroded a sense of the astrological arts being sacred or full of ‘wonder and awe’.
The modern daily horoscope based solely on the ‘sun sign’, delivered in a generic rote manner, where unimaginative “astrologers” tick off boxes and feel-good quotes, is mostly a falsehood. It is a modern consumerist version of what you use to be a way to understand the Will of the Heavens and the movements of the Gods.
The fact that you can even get a ‘birth chart’ drawn up today with extreme ease was unheard of in the ancient world, where charts were calculated by hand, and usually only for royalty and or to guide entire civilizations.
In many ancient empires, astrologers could override rulers. So whether or not you recognize it, your life has been affected by astrology, if for the very fact that it helped shape the civilizations that have birthed the modern world.
In other instances, astrological wisdom and insight were used to direct and organize everything from planting and sowing seasons to religious rites, to the division of what skill sets were taught to what people. This was a way to create deeper alignment with the cycles of nature and its temporal flow of power.
All of Nature Breaths Together Through Time
The breath expands and contracts.
It evervesses and condenses.
It cycles and pulsates.
This is the nature of rhythm, and cycles, which are the primary way in which the universe turns and churns through time.
Events repeat themselves, and there are predictable phases we can monitor. This principle is inarguable and even forms a core foundation in the modern scientific method which heralds predictability.
Something is likely to happen again because it has happened before. This is how astrology first emerged: observation. Events would occur here on Earth, and at the same ‘time’ certain patterns were occurring in the sky.
Over time, this theme would continue...similar patterns would continue to repeat themselves as the complex relationship between the earth and sky played out over eons. This then was codified in astrological systems.
It is not as difficult as some people might imagine to predict, for we do it all the time. Consider how much expectation there is in the actions you take from day to day, and how much you are predicting outcomes.
It’s a core part of being human to ‘divine” the future. Have you learned the patterns of the partners, bosses, friends, or pets in your life?
Can you gauge how certain behaviors from you will affect these beings when they are in certain moods or make certain requests of you? Can you respond in real-time to them with measured responses to illicit desired outcomes? What is that if not pattern recognition and divination? This notion of predictability is ‘one’ part of astrology because it is a study of correspondences and repeating patterns.
There is however a deeper truth to grasp here, and that is that all of nature moves together through the rhythm of time. For we each have an ‘inner sky’ and stars within each of us move in alignment with the stars of the ‘outer sky’.
If there is one core message that describes the heart of astrology it is that all things are in relationship with one another and that the microcosm within is a reflection of the macrocosm without.
All events, whether they happen inside of you, or outside of you, occur concurrently, in the context of cyclical time. Thus to study patterns in the sky, was to study patterns on earth, and to study these patterns was also to know the patterns within each person.
Prisms of Light & Astrological Systems
The study of astrology is also the study of light. At the most basic level, we have cycles of day and night, and as we go deeper we study colored lights in the sky as they reach the Earth. For many epochs, this occurred with the naked eye, and now telescopes help amplify this ability. This is one concrete aspect of this art and science, and at another level, there is something here that transcends mathematics and calculations.
There is consciousness in relationship with gargantuan forces beyond our comprehension.
Many different forms of astrology (Western, Chinese, Vedic, Mayan) work precisely because the underlying engine that makes it work is beyond the ability of human beings to fully grasp. This is a paradox.
Planetary, celestial forces and mythological forces are too powerful, nebulous and undifferentiated for us to relate to directly in any ‘functional’ way. Thus, what we do as humans is create ‘prisms’, that metaphorically bend the light of these forces to create functional charts we can relate to. These ‘prisms’ are astrological systems themselves, which are symbolic and not literal representations of actual forces in nature.
We Start With This:
We Do This:
We Get This:
The Death of Time & The Reanimating of Cyclical Time
I am currently in the process of studying to become a ‘full-fledged’ astrologer, and although there are many gifts in the study of astrology, one of the most important treasures it has to offer us, is the reanimating of time itself. The way a culture relates to time describes how it understands its place in the unfolding of the cosmos and the very nature of that cosmos.
Modern culture has de-animated time, making every time and place, just like every other time and place, because we relate to time through the ‘clock’. Every second, every hour, every week, every month, and every year is without ‘quality’ or ‘flavor’. The planetary forces, zodiac signs, and houses of astrology show us that the essence of time changes, it is alive, and we are in relationship to it.
Astrological systems, modern and ancient tell us that every time and place is imbued with a ‘power’ or a ‘spirit’. A spirit of the time. This is deeply vitalizing and an important step in anchoring into living with The Ancestral Now. It is a part of being human to have an animate relationship with time.
Astrology is time-space animism.
It enlivens time and space with mythology, and myths are somatically potent stories that are representations of natural forces and cycles that humans can relate to. It is the myths that form the bones of astrology, and when we layer story into time and space, we layer ourselves into it, and it into us.
Awesome, maybe you phrased it that way, sounds very interesting
What does awaken ancestral wisdom mean for you? I just put it on my list 😂👍🙏