0:00 [Music] hey everybody welcome to another episode of the universe within podcast this episode of the show is being sponsored by my friends over at a company called real mushrooms real mushrooms.com um Sky Chilton and his father Jeff Chilton I interviewed Jeff a number of episodes ago uh really interesting guys I really enjoyed that conversation with Jeff um and it's a company that sells and distributes medicinal mushrooms in powder or capsule form um I was really happy to have these guys come on uh I
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1:33 think they're really ethical guys um but um the the product is really amazing it's all 100% mushrooms they're organic uh and and that's really rare for better for worse the supplement in industry is is highly unregulated um and so often when you get supplements you don't necessarily know what you're getting you may be getting some mushroom you may be getting a bunch of fillers and other things often times even when you're buying what may be a mushroom it may not have any of that Mushroom in it at all unfortunately uh even some of the big uh I think even the biggest company that that sells mushrooms actually it's not the fruiting body not the mushroom itself it's the melal which is grown on grain and then
2:18 those things are mixed up and then sold in a supplement form so not only you not getting the mushroom itself you're getting the mycelium uh mixed with grain so um it's one of the amazing things are real mushrooms is it's exactly that it's real mushrooms so it's 100% mushrooms organic so you know you're getting a really good uh product you're getting the actual fruiting body the the mushroom itself 100% of that um and again just really great guys I'm I'm really happy to have them on and supporting this podcast uh so if you'd like a really good product uh you'd like to start working with medicinal mushrooms um check out their site realm mushrooms.com um and also listeners of this show uh if you go go to their site realm mushrooms.com Universe you get 25% off your first
3:05 order uh which is a really good deal and I think once you uh uh start working and and tasting their products you'll you'll really uh see and feel a big difference so uh thank you to them and uh I think that's it and without further Ado here is the intro to the show on this episode of the podcast I sat down with Melanie Reinhardt uh Melanie was introduced to me by by a friend of mine uh and I was really grateful he uh made that introduction uh it was really a pleasure for me to sit down and speak with Melanie Melanie is uh an astrologer and we got into some uh really interesting discussions we talked about her her life her story how she got interested in astrology uh what is Astrology the
3:53 historical significance of it um how it really fell out of favor with a lot of modern science um but the historical origins of it uh the the the role it plays in myth and mythology she wrote a really wonderful book about Chiron so we talked a lot about that about its mythology and and really just the power of Mythos in our lives and uh kind of the archetype of of Chiron is is the Wounded healer and and a teacher and uh how that can really uh help to elucidate certain things in our lives so it was a really fascinating conversation I I really enjoyed speaking with Melanie she has a a beautiful voice and presence I could uh listen to her talk about myth for for hours on end so um thank you to her for coming on and uh
4:40 I hope you all really enjoyed this episode um as always uh if you're able to support this podcast that's a really big help to me it's what allows me to continue bringing on these guests and uh doing all the work required to get these shows out patreon is a really good option it's a website you can sign up for as little as a dollar a month there's different tiers you can sign up for for those tiers give you different things back things like early access to shows bonus material q&as um so if you feel like you're gaining something from this podcast that's a a really beautiful way to uh to reciprocate to all of the patrons to all of the supporters and patreon as always thank you very much for your help uh I I very much appreciate it um if you're not able to do that um doing some of the the
5:25 simple things if you're watching this the video version on YouTube or Spotify um but in YouTube subscribing to the show turning on the notification Bell liking the video uh the those things really help with the algorithms uh leaving any questions or comments in the comment section and then if you're listening to this uh on Spotify Apple podcast uh Apple podcast is still the the big one um also Following the show and leaving a starred rating and a short review is always a really big help so uh I think that's it and without further Ado here is is my conversation with Melanie the the out of the maze
6:10 today running up from The Maze I'm running up from The Maze I'm running not from The Maze today I'm running out from The Maze running up from The Maze run out of the maze to death [Music] well Melanie thank you very much for coming on um we were just talking a little bit before and you were recommended to me by a friend of mine who who's also uh someone who who has worked with me um he's he's also from the UK his name is James Robinson and he spoke very highly of you and uh I I I hadn't heard of you but then I based on his recommendation I started doing some
6:56 research and um also as we were mentioning a lot of the the podcast one of the main themes is kind of plant medicine and and Shamanism and esoteric traditions and religion and spirituality and uh astrology is something that's that's always uh really interested me and and it it very much I think ties into my own interest in in ancient cultures and and their deep knowledge of of the cosmos and astrology and and even you know I'm coming from Peru and there's all of these megalithic structures which have this uh just amazingly precise astronomical configuration so it it's a field that really interests me and at the same time it's something that I feel I I don't know as much as I should about so when
7:42 when he recommended you it was really um I think serendipit is and a pleasure to have you come and and speak a bit about your work and so maybe just to start you could introduce yourself to the audience uh who you are where you're from and and what your story is and what got you interested in in the work you're doing okay well um I'm Melanie Reinhardt and I live in the UK at the moment I was born in Zimbabwe what's now Zimbabwe it was redia back then and lived there until I was 22 um I went to University in Cape Town South Africa and then I moved over to England
8:28 for a variety of reason reasons one of which was I wanted to follow the trail of astrology that had presented itself to me at the age of 10 um I was off school with a broken arm and the National Library of rodesia as it was was pretty much at the end of our road so I used to just wander up there instead of going to school which was great you know and um I vividly remember that there was there was just one shelf about maybe a meter wide that was called philosophy
9:14 psychology and religion that's the total of the National Collection of that subject area right because Ria was a very agrarian type of culture and so there were you know lots of books about mending tractors and planting corn and doing all this loads and loads of them but only one on philosophy psychology and religion you know that said there were some real Treasures on that single shelf which I started devouring eagerly and you know things like part of the collected works of Yung and Freud and theosophy and some of the ancient texts like the aita and all
10:00 those kind of things and there was one small astrology book which very sadly I do not remember the title or the author but what I do remember is taking this off the shelf and beginning to read it and having this experience of somehow knowing that there was way more to astrology than what was mentioned in this thin little book and you know at the same time a real excitement like having rediscovered something and so I just memorized all the sunshines there wasn't anything else in the book memorized all the sunsh signes and spent years and years just
10:45 asking everybody I came across what their birthday was and figuring out their sunsh sign and thinking about the book and thinking about them and just trying to do trying to Lear learn observationally Etc and then the next step on that Journey came when I was living in Cape Town as a student and a friend gave me a copy of one of the books of danne Roar who sometimes is called the F the father of modern astrology amazing man and this book was called the pulse of life and I still have that very same copy this was when I was about out was either my 19th or my 20th
11:33 birthday now and I opened the book and began reading and it was like an absolute Epiphany because I just felt was so moving I felt that this man who I'd never met um knew me way better than my own parents did or even than I did it was just inspirational and in that moment moment I knew that I wanted to follow this trail of astrology wherever it would lead me you know and so I did and that partly was what drew me to come to England because there was no particular
12:18 esoteric mure uh in South Africa at that time at least not that I connected with you know um and so I did relocate to England that was also partly to do with the war going on at that time in rodesia and um our parents bless him they were very keen that me and my sister should at least get a footo hold somewhere else because I think they saw what was coming down the tracks and so with their blessing i relocated to to England um and when I first came to London and went
13:05 to the very famous wkins Bookshop it's one of the oldest and biggest esoteric bookshops in England um with a long history I I don't know how long it's been going but a long time and it was just absolutely marvelous to find shelf after shelf of books on the subjects which had become very interesting to me that said you know back in those days that there there really wasn't that many books on astrology in print like it was pretty much possible to read everything that was easily available and it's so so different now
13:51 there are like thousands upon thousands of astrology books it's like the whole the whole field has just exploded since then so now date-wise I'm talking about the early' 70s um and it was just completely wonderful um I then connected with a Sufi teacher um I heard him speak in friend's house Houston another famous venue for different esoteric speakers and I knew that he was the head of a community here in
14:38 England and after the lecture I felt so deeply moved by what he had said that I I sort of cornered him after the lecture and asked if I could come to live in the community and he was very quiet and didn't say anything for a little while but looked very straight into my eyes and just said why and I came straight back and said it's a matter of life and death I have to come and he said okay come and that began quite a long period of several
15:26 years where I mostly lived in the community and did some traveling with them but I mention this because it only turned out that this man whose name was FAL en Khan he was at that time the director of a Publishing Company who were Dane roar's major publisher in those days so in the community was a whole Shelf with you know beautiful bound editions of Dane roar's work and so that was what I plunged myself into and studied for years that's really my main background uh in
16:12 astrology I subsequently met Dane rard twice once at a workshop he was giving in New York and once actually with my Sufi teacher who took me along to a kind of business meeting that he was having with Dane rer and it was Dane rer who kind of gave me the shove to go professional with my work um I I you know I never made the aspiration or made the decision to become a professional astrologer I really didn't um I just kept on following this Trail which I found so
16:59 enriching in which I loved so much to study and you know just gradually little bit by little bit I got to the stage of being able to offer readings but it had never still occurred to me that I would be a professional astrologer and it was actually Roger who gave me the push um to actually do that so there was a very particular little Trail and you know once I realized that and did begin to work professionally I also I I decided that I really needed to get some proper training because I knew that left to my own
17:44 devices there were all kinds of things I would never bother with and to kind of round out my education um I did the diploma of the faculty of astrological studies so I kind of did things backwards did all my own learning on my own without a teacher without any classes uh even up to professional level and then after a few years of working professionally I then did all the kind of you know more intellectual study of it and you know I sometimes wonder how on Earth I would have managed if I had done it the normal way around in other would learned first
18:30 through the intellect and then tried to apply that because mine was a very experiential kind of learning with observation and feeling and Attunement and that kind of thing rather than going in first at the intellectual level but people do manage and they do a wonderful job but I'm not sure I could have when when you were younger and you were reading these astrology books was and you mentioned that there was kind of this this very visceral feeling did it feel like you were you were remembering something like
19:15 you were coming home in a way or or was there just something that was yeah yes I mean I could I could say that um I I could say it felt like I'd known it before or that it was familiar me to me in a way that I must have somewhere done it before or something like that but the truth is I don't know it did just feel very familiar and yes as you say like a kind of a homecoming maybe to to start um if people aren't familiar with astrology how would how would you defined
20:01 astrology maybe how would you define astronomy cosmology I think these are terms that that people are familiar with but but also they they seem maybe in the general populace not to be so clearly defined right well you know I'm I'm no scholar but I'll give you my own take on on these topics um you know astrology is it's a very ancient tradition which really studies studies a human being's life in relation to what's going on in the sky
20:46 above and there's the F famous hermetic maxim of As Above So Below I personally like to take that further because in a sense it's it's only through our normal visual senses that we can think of and above and the below but how I prefer to Envision it is that there is a um there is like a unified process of
21:35 unfolding in the CMOS and we are all participating in it all the time and the language of astrology um and and also with its study of Planetary Cycles can give a very rich um potential for for the language of describing different experiences and it also astrology tends to adapt down the ages to the different cultures within which it's being expressed and that I find incredibly interesting because if you
22:22 compare different cultures you can see that there's quite a bit of resonance in the imagery and how the constellations are understood and so forth there's also quite a lot of difference but it is still amazing how much resonance there actually is and you know during the 20th century and ongoing there have been some discoveries of new objects in fact there's been an explosion of discovery of all kinds of new objects um one class of which I became particularly interested in and these are called the centors
23:09 so they're they're in the general category of minor planets and the minor planet Chiron was the first one of that whole genre to be discovered that was back in 1977 and then from 1992 more objects that behaved in a similar way to Chiron began to be discovered and they were named centors because Chiron is now like the the chief one of that group and he is a centor and when that whole explosion of new
23:55 information was being presented by by scientific astronomy um it was referred to as the the most significant Discovery since the time of cernus now cernus was really the fellow who revealed to the world that it was us on the earth that were going around the Sun not the other way around because for a long time astrology was basically geocentric so meaning that the Earth was
24:41 considered to be the center with everything else revolving around it and one can see you know beautiful medieval maps of the cosmos very ordered and very beautiful with the Earth at the mdle at the middle and then the different spheres of the planets spaced according to their speed relative to the Earth all the way out to Saturn the last of the visible planets and then different Heavenly Realms on the edge of that beautiful diagrams and then a whole different cosmology came in from the time of cernus where the sun was known to be the
25:29 center with all the planets revolving around it and so the the discovery of these centors was said to be um The Herald of a whole new cosmology and the most significant set of discoveries since cernus so it was really a big deal and symbolically I do find that so interesting because the majority of as of astrology now is still you using the geocentric model which to my mind that doesn't make it old-fashioned or archaic it it's a
26:17 wonderful recognition of the fact that you know whatever we do with our astrology related to individual lives or even long sweeps of collective history it's all happening on the earth and so to recognize that is to see the heavens and what what symbolic knowledge they can offer from a geocentric point of view so I personally don't have a problem with that at all can you speak a little bit more about the history um even for example like in in
27:02 astrology uh for example I my parents are American but I was actually born in Sri Lanka and even when I was born they they took me or I guess they took me to to an astrologer who who did my birth chart and I was showing it to a friend the other day and he was saying well this is more like the the kind of the Eastern way of looking at astrology and there's the Western Way and and think a lot of people probably aren't familiar as well that you know one of the Beauties I guess about modern the the modern times we live in is we have become very specialized in things and that's led to tremendous progress but maybe one could argue that one of the downsides of that is we we've lost more of this holistic
27:50 way of looking at things and and throughout a lot of ancient history including the Greeks which I'm sure we'll get into or like in India um a lot of these fields weren't necessarily separate I mean the the field of astrology was tied into mathematics and physics and and chemistry and biology I mean they were all seen as somehow interdependent uh and now we seem to have separated those out but as you were saying the the history of astrology is very old I mean all over the world it was something that seemed to be really an integral part of of of societies and culture cultures yes absolutely and so you
28:35 know in terms of the history of astrology really you can see it interwoven with many different aspects of any culture and it's only relatively recently in the west that astrology was banned from Academia and scape goated as something archaic or even evil uh and it was at that point just a few hundred years ago where astrology and astronomy became separate Sciences but they before that they were always
29:20 together and you know what's so interesting is that in Western medicine again if few 100 years ago all doctors were astrologers because when the cures were herbal they all had their planetary correspondences and connections and the making up of medicines was done in a ritual manager um ritual Manner and tied to auspicious times in terms of the planets so the history of medicine is full of
30:05 astrological references and in fact the the welcome library in London has a magnificent collection of ancient astrological manuscripts because that's where the history of medicine has um that's what it rests on in a way yeah so when for for example you were speaking of a number of years ago when when they found a number of these uh I'm not sure because they've been classified in different ways as as minor planets or asteroids but but these
30:51 Centon objects I think one of the things a lot of people have confused around and I'd be curious what your what Your take is is this symbology versus the the literal aspects of these things I mean a lot of these are tied for example like that that story of Chiron or the centur and Greek myth and even with mythology I think there's so much either confusion or different ways of looking at that um but in in astrology when when someone is speaking about something like like the centur or a very particular locality in the cosmos is there something that's that that's simply
31:37 only metaphorical or archetypal in that that that that that object is embodying certain characteristics where the the mythology is alluding to to to certain properties that that can be elucidated within the practitioner or or the patient or do you think there's actually something some sort of energy or or something that's actually in that location that's also really relevant and the Mythos is is pointing uh to to something that's actually as you said as above so below that that in that in that time space kind of way of looking at something that there is something
32:22 there that's very powerful that that's maybe beyond the mythology as well if that makes any sense yeah absolutely you know one of the things that I greatly love and appreciate about astrology is that whichever way you look at it ultimately it it brings you nose to nose with the great mystery which can't be explained and that's that's not it's not a way out of your question but that's the truth as a practitioner I mean people can headbang for years trying to understand astrology and maybe finding the way that they think is correct and truthful and
33:09 all the rest but in practice particularly working with the soul and the human journey in life it will always bring you up to the Mysteries you know and so in terms of you know looking for a foundation of astrological understanding in my experience anyway it's always a mixture of different things that speak to different levels of our being you know and sometimes the astronomical symbolism is breathtakingly literal it it is so with the centors just
33:56 extraordinary and and sometimes it's not so obvious but you know if you contemplate it you'll get there kind of thing I've also had experiences with the planets where it truly was as if there was a being behind what we call a planet or a centur or a asteroid or whatever whatever it is that there really was was somebody there um and that those beings they they can speak so you know a few hundred years
34:43 ago in that cosmology the the planets were considered to also be Spirits which would then in the magical tradition they would then be conjured for various purposes my experience has been similar but different like I've I've never tried to conjure any planetary energy but there's no doubt that you know in the course of studying and looking to understand and more importantly to also apply that knowledge for the benefit of other
35:29 people that it is sometimes really as if they are speaking uh and so in that sense you know the symbolic level is true as is the mythological level as is the astronomy and there really is something out there but not literally physically it's on a whole other level so it's a kind of rich lamin ation of different levels of cosmology and you know I suspect that you know if we take the history of astrology way further back into preliterate cultures from from the research I've
36:17 done it does seem that pretty much every culture preliterate as well has had some kind of cosmology where the the heavens represent the spiritual Realms um or the Realms of the Sacred um and a source of inspiration and enrichment and enlivenment and so you know back long before the days when the ephemeres had been worked out
37:03 that's that's a set of tables which give the exact positions of where all the planets are it's like the astrologer's Bible you know but long before that was even constructed there was still this kind of dialogue between man on Earth and and the heavens and that might have occurred in a number of different cosmological forms but the sort of basic principle is the same you know do you think astrology began to in more of the Western World fall out of
37:49 favor kind of at a similar time when when other things I mean for example we were speaking about plant medicines and uh the persecution of of plant medicine practitioners who were referred to as witches and and and also again because all of these things have this dualistic aspect but but again there's a great Beauty in reductionist thinking it's really what what leads to specialization and and and really the refinement of certain types of energies but but again then that can come at the expense of of of a more holistic or or general practitioner View and you see that even in modern day medicine the
38:35 general practitioner has really fallen out of favor um I I I practice Brazilian jiu-jitsu which is a martial art in a number of years ago I I broke my nose and I was just outside of Time Square in in New York city so you know some people would would argue this is like the the epicenter of the entire world um and I went to the emergency room and they weren't able to to to set my nose and this is in probably the biggest city in the US one of the biggest cities in the world but because there wasn't a specialist there on call there was no one in this gargantuan Hospital who could set my nose um and so it was very fascinating in that way but but getting back to
39:20 astrology um when science began to become more reductionist do you think there was a a falling out of astrology in in the same way uh that that maybe some of these more mystical Traditions or shamanic practices began to fall out because as you said there's there's something that that at least in the time we're in or we were in or we are in today that there was something that maybe couldn't be reduced or wasn't tangible or even we we maybe lacked the tools to be able to to see something I mean I'm often reminded of I think it was in in London there there was a doctor this was probably in the the late 18th century who he was he
40:09 was ridiculed because he was delivering babies and he had this wild idea that the doctors should wash their hands before they deliver babies because a lot of babies were were dying and and he was ridiculed because he you know all the the the knowledge at the time was saying well what you believe in these like the these things that you can't see that are in your hands that are causing infections of the baby and you know that's that's like Spirit Science and you're mad and he actually died in a in a mental uh institution because he was he was so ostracized and criticized and and it wasn't until that they developed the microscope that they actually could see that that what he was saying was
40:55 true but but it it just wasn't in in in the field of perception at the time and so I know that's kind of a long-winded question but do you think there there's something that that astrology began to fall out as as certain particular cosmology began to form in the society at the time yes definitely um timing wise the the receding of astrology coincided with the beginning of the so-called Enlightenment period so that's just a few hundred years ago and interesting that you mention about the the dualistic framework because you know there's nothing wrong
41:40 with dualism in the sense of you know even cells divide to grow but it's it's when a moral loading gets put on top of that that things run into trouble so um you know we could think of this very roughly in the sense of right brain and left brain ways of learning um and there if any listeners are interested in that topic particularly I would really encourage people to read that wonderful book called The Master and his Emissary by Ian mcgilchrist
42:27 it's a t of a thing um written in what at first appears to be really quite technical language the gu's a neuroscientist amongst other things but if you get into it it's an absolutely unput downable book that busts a lot of the myths about right brain left brain and all that but gives a very clear description of how the two function differently it's really about the how not the what you know and so when learning and education was becoming increasingly left brain dominant let's just say for shorthand
43:13 um all of the intuitive arts and the traditional Arts which also draw on knowledge coming from a different source like inherited knowledge for example they began to divide and then um astrology began to be vilified and banned from Academia and all the rest of it and it didn't ever die out completely it just went very much underground and then at the beginning of the or the late 19th century it started to be discovered in the con in the context of
44:01 esoteric studies and I personally think that in a very secular society like we've had in our times astrology does not belong in the mainstream it really doesn't and now we could say it's almost mainstream just because of the explosion of activity uh in the field but I don't believe that it belongs in the mainstream I believe it belongs in the the underground or the
44:46 alternative cultures because of this very different way of using the mind at least in practice now the field is big enough enough to be able to Encompass um very scholarly types of people as well we've got lots of them in the field of astrology which is marvelous really and there are even now university courses which specialize in the study of astrology now that's not the same as training to be a practitioner but it's a very rich and I believe necessary um foundational thing that people can study if they feel drawn to do so you know but in my feeling it is a
45:34 living tradition and it's one like many Living Traditions it's one that comes alive the more you work at it and the more you actually practice it so I remember um the astrologer Rick tonner Richard Tes who's written some very famous books now sort of bests sellers not just within the astrology field and his most famous one I believe is Cosmos and psyche and he and some colleagues are doing some amazing webinars which you'll find on
46:20 YouTube but I vividly remember and this is now from a conference in 1994 where um a young woman obviously a new is astrology student and was obviously feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the incredible range of different techniques that one can apply and different approaches and so forth and she was basically asking the question of well well what how do I know what to work with you know and I'll never forget Richard's reply he said in astrology meaning here meaning applied astrology not scholarly
47:08 astrology you can only work with what is burnished into your soul in other words it's our inner connection with the material and the field that enables us to do what we do really and there's no kind of direct infallible formula for for getting that it's not something which can be got it's like it's something that comes by grace in response to the love and the dedication of the student and and not only the student I think that's true of someone immersed in astrology for their whole lives you know
47:55 you can't necess you can't drum that up to order you know it is Grace also I think that the amount of uh the amount of knowing and knowledge that is revealed is really according to need because we do now live in the age of information or some people say it's the age of misinformation but at any rate there is truly an explosion of astrological information out there now information doesn't guarantee deeper understanding or wisdom
48:41 not at all so information can leave one you know with one's head buzzing with all kinds of ideas flying around in it which don't really go anywhere don't really connect and so there is a you know an an ancient esoteric principle um where you know inner knowledge is granted on a need basis so if there are things we don't need to know about they they they won't be shown to us and yet if we sincerely if we approach astrology sincerely with a wish for clarification or inspiration
49:27 or guidance it will come and it's something which comes to some people very easily and naturally and I like to imagine those people have done it before like in another life and so forth and yet with others it takes a lot of study like years and years of study and hard work to get to that point where the wisdom stream is opened so to speak so it's also a very individual thing and people's individual relationship with the whole field and what it
50:13 means um is that's very important so in in many ways it's difficult to generalize about it and also you know even though there's an increasing number of icient texts which have been translated from the original language into English uh there's really very little material which which really speaks to what the ancient practitioners were experiencing and doing with the astrology that they were learning and practicing you know like the astrologers journal and I think of a parallel here
51:00 you know that um although many fine astrologers have written many fine books which will live on after they die in truth we won't really know exactly what was going on in the inner worlds as they were learning and as the wisdom was coming to them you know and so to go back to what I said before it's like pretty much if you really if you pursue the understanding of astrology in pretty much any direction you get to the edge of the
51:46 great Mysteries uh which can't be explained very easily and in some ways we could say they're not meant to be because explanation that's a very left brain activity trying to get something into order or to make sense but the way that the knowledge of astrology touches us can be so much more than that you know so I hope that's helpful that's just some of my own experience yeah it seems like one of the the fascinating things about astrology is at least in a way that that many
52:32 people use it is this beginning to understand someone as an individual their their their place in the cosmos depending based upon when they were born what the energy of that time was and and so that that does point to to this individualistic aspect that that every human being is unique that we're different that we have our own gifts and our own life path and own trajectory and and I can see you know very well how you're speaking that that especially with a lot of these paths that that may be considered more shamanic or Mystic it's difficult to to necessarily have a defined path because you are entering into so much mystery yeah um
53:19 having said that going back to the the dualistic nature astrology is a field and and and like anything in order to define something we have to put some sort of parameters or boundaries or definitions to it yeah so from from your experience what what do you think some of those those pillars or or those boundaries or those definitions are that that separate astrology uh from other fields whether it's in the realm of science whether it's in the realm of of a shamanic practice what what do you think it is that that defines astrology and and what are maybe for you some of those pillars that that actually give it it its
54:05 base well I for me um I think the the the cosmological feeling I can only describe it as a feeling um that while everybody is indeed their own unique individual on their own unique path we're all part of a cosmos where everything kind of fits together um in a way that can't really be totally simplified or ordered but that's why I call it a feeling and So within that there's you
54:50 know an enormous maybe infinite variation of the individual that are existing within that Cosmos and so you know the the the encounter with a person and their own unique horoscope you know rep replicated over many many many times and many years it does also kind of encourage a real feeling of acceptance of
55:37 difference so it it's not that you know we all live in the same soup and we are the same soup so to speak uh we all live in the same soup but hey it might be full of carrots and potatoes and beans and all sorts of different people and time and time time again I've seen that for example if someone is having a difficulty in a relationship you know be it with a wife or a child or a husband or just between friends taking the astrological view can really open up some space and there's the metaphor of space again it opens up space around things so
56:23 that Insight can arise naturally because there there are many higher States Of Consciousness which require the element of space and indeed in the Tibetan system of the five elements they consist of the four ones that we usually think of in the west you know Earth fire air water plus space and there that's not meant as literal space it's a quality of energy like a vibrational field which is actually foundational to all the rest and some connection with the quality of
57:10 space which we could just Define as a kind of a oh wow a kind of aha space which is deeply relaxing and deeply clears the mind some measure of that is necessary for other kinds of insights to arrive by themselves um and that's what happens very often when the astrological view is embarked on as applied to a specific person or a specific situation and how I always think of it you know if I'm doing a reading is that it is a dialogue so to
57:58 speak so it's a dialogue between me and the person whose chart I'm reading and astrology and so leaving space as it were for insight to arrive in an organic way often within the person whose chart I'm reading you know to me that's actually preferable and and it does open a very rich space for people's understanding to come forth by themselves that's how I see it so when when you started working um as an
58:44 astrologer how would you describe that work what is that what is that look like if someone comes to you how would you say it looks to them and and and how would you describe what what you're doing so that too is difficult from the point of view that people come to visit an astrologer for a whole variety of different reasons now I I don't really I don't really work with people who are looking for me to prove something to them because that just goes
59:30 nowhere and you know that almost never happens uh some people have very specific themes that they want to explore and others don't you know increasingly there's now a whole whole cach of people who down the years have found their own way to seeing how incredibly useful a astrology can be in terms of understanding things also in terms of planning stuff uh if you know what the planets are up to you can sometimes make wiser choices in terms of what your schedule what you choose to do or not to do and
1:00:16 how you run your life that's very exciting to me and that is now a knowledge which is filtering strongly into the collective which is wonderful you know there was a time when you know even printed di long before the internet even printed Diaries didn't didn't even show the moon phases some did but it wasn't standard and now it totally is and of course there's loads of web websites that give the astronomical details that one would want and also there's websites that will give you astrological tips about it as well so once you have a basic idea of how to engage with the lunar
1:01:04 cycle through the months of the calendar year you have an absolutely wonderful tool at your fingertips that you can make direct practical use of every month for example so by extension there are some people who will once in a while when they feel the need they will want to look more deeply at some of the other patterns also going on uh in their life process um and that's that's very common now and that's not so much AA a case of somebody bringing
1:01:49 problems and expecting me to say something do something that's going to fix the problems you know it's more an exploration uh in which life situations are discussed or addressed and so forth um but the spe the specifics of why people would consult an astrologer can vary hugely and also you know I don't like to Define my work too tightly in terms of what kind of astrologer I am or cuz of course in terms of specialization that has also happened in the field of astrology and there's now
1:02:35 loads and loads of different kinds of definition as to what kind of astrologer that person is but you know I sometimes wonder about that because that that might be uh on on people's um you know publicity blurb but I think that you know the human soul process is the human soul process and it doesn't really care about the definitions of what kind of astrology somebody says they're practicing and so it's the person and what they bring that will also dictate um how how I would work in the
1:03:21 manner that I'll go about speaking about the child and so forth you know and I also you know down the years I have studied various different techniques which fit various different purposes so to speak so it's not a one siiz fits all in in terms of what happens in reading or what I do you know one of the the books you wrote uh was about Chiron which was was discovered a number of years ago maybe you can speak a little bit about that and then one of the things I I'd really love to get into is is the mythology that the Mythos and the power behind
1:04:08 that and and Chiron seems to be something I think it could be a really great example of of of the power of the myth of the symbology of of how it relates to to the astrology to maybe even the times we're in you know it seems like there there is so much there in the Mythos and and I think a lot of times we we take these things almost to be silly stories that were just told to to children but there's so much knowledge there um one of the teachers I have who I have a tremendous amount of respect for uh he comes from a a little group of people in the Colombian Amazon called the tuu people and before they use any any medicine in a ceremonial context which they use a lot it's very much just a
1:04:55 very much part of their their daily activity which is uh bringing together the group in ceremony to to resolve issues to discuss things um but every time the medicine is used and and they have many different medicines they always tell the story and and at the beginning I would think well this seems pretty repetitive you know this is the the the how many times uh that I've heard the story but but there's a real power in the story and there's so much there and every time the story is told new information can be found and discovered and as he would say not only is it the words but there's actually like these healing codes embedded within the
1:05:40 stories that that actually the story themselves can become a Healer that that there's a real power within the story so um maybe could you you speak a bit about about Chiron and and what your your interest than that is and then um you know at any point if if you feel like going into the the mythology as well and and why and how that is so important yes well um I'll I'll start at the beginning so Chiron was discovered in 1977 and all the way along um
1:06:27 his journey into Collective awareness there were really symbolic occurrences for example usually when a new object is discovered well it's first given a number and then eventually a name is proposed and sometimes several names and then uh this astronomical body called called the international astronomical Union uh they will convene a conference in which the possibilities are discussed and a name is finally Chosen and that process can actually take
1:07:12 years but in the case of Chiron the man who discovered it who was called Charles kowal or Koval um in terms of where it was discovered was discovered in between Saturn and Uranus so in other words in between the the in the in between zone between the border of the visible world and the beginning of the invisible world because Saturn is visible everywhere and Uranus was the first planet to be discovered with maths and
1:07:58 Technology I believe it is sometimes visible in some locations but basically it's not really uh and it certainly represents that edge the edge of where the invisible World touches the visible World um and so Chiron was is C discovered in between those two which says volumes about what it's actually about so the name Chiron was proposed immediately and accepted immediately now that's unheard of and so that happened because coal knew quite a lot about mythology
1:08:43 and realized that this object that was discovered must have a connection with Saturn and Uranus and so he thought about Chiron and absolutely amazing so so right off the connection between the science and the mythology was there and I'd like to add as a sidebar here at the moment for some of the later objects that were found the ones in the cental category the names were actually proposed by astrologers and given to our contact in the in in the iau the
1:09:31 international astronomical Union uh which for quite a while was run by this very open-minded British fellow called Brian maren and the way astrologers got their names was through during the kind of Empirical research uh that you can only do in a in a in a real living connection with a person or your knowledge about a famous person if you don't actually know them and also looking at history and looking at all different kinds of things in this very rich tapestry of associations so names were proposed
1:10:16 there was about eight of them that were proposed by astrologers so there too we've got the symbolism speaking loudly it's the cooperation the fruitful cooperation between the world of science and the world of astrology so we could go left brain right brain there again except that you know that's that's simplifying a bit a bit too much really because you can't class astrology as either right brain or or left brain because you really need to engage both in order to study and practice it you know yeah so it got the name immediately and Chiron is a very
1:11:03 well-known figure in the mythology and also in art there's quite a few famous painters who were moved by the story of Chiron and intrigued by the image of this hybrid creature being half horse and half human so The Story Goes that Chiron was the son of a nymph called fyra and the Olympian God Kronos who M with Fila when he Kronos was in his horse
1:11:49 form they were in fact both in their horse form because as we know the gods can shape shift so when Chiron was born and came out as half a horse and half human his mother fyra was completely horrified and saw him like a monster and prayed to the gods to be made into anything other than what she was namely the mother of a monster and the gods duly obliged and changed her into a linden tree which in nors mythology is
1:12:36 associated with divination so Chiron was abandoned at Birth and in the time honored manner of myth and Legend he was found by a shepherd and in this case taken to the great sun god Apollo who actually fostered Chiron this too has an astronomical parallel because so the theory goes in scientific astronomy at the
1:13:23 moment these objects the centors including Chiron as the chief of the centors they were pulled into the solar system perhaps at different points along the evolution of the solar system they were pulled in from What's called the corpa belt which is like a great Ring of matter outside the solar system that was discovered in 1992 along with the second centor to be discovered um and they have very elliptical orbits
1:14:10 so it's as if the orbit expresses a sound of longing of longing and desire to get to the light um if you translate an elliptical orbit into sound it it makes it it would make a sound like a police siren sort of so like emergency blue light flashing Etc so the theme of an emergence or a deep longing longing for the light cuz the sun is the center of the solar system
1:14:56 longing for the center and so after Kiron was abandoned and fostered he was trained by Apollo in all kinds of different arts and skills including medicine archery survival skills and in fact Chiron became in turn the kind of foster father or mentor to well pretty much any Greek hero that you can
1:15:43 name was fostered and mentored by Chiron so there was um a sense in which Chiron was able to tr train them in the gifts and skills which would help them fulfill their own unique Destinies on their own unique Journeys so there was at one stage a great battle and during that battle Chiron was wounded in the leg in some versions it's the thigh or the the knee or the ankle but it's always the legs in other words
1:16:28 the animal half and what happened then was because Chiron was a demig God so half mortal he was neither able to die from the wound and be released nor was he able to heal it in spite of his own status as a great healer and Mentor so in in one of the classic versions it said that he lived 900 and something years in a state of Perpetual profound
1:17:15 Agony not being able to find the way to cure his own wound and yet persisting with his destiny to Mentor all these Heroes and bring healing and kindness and so forth um and the story does resolve in a rather interesting way in that Chiron changed places with Prometheus now Prometheus is famous as having stolen the fire from the gods but if you look a little deeper into that story as with any story there there
1:18:01 is way more Nuance in it and so the the reason that Prometheus stole the fire from the gods was because he felt morally obliged to take the fire back because it belonged to all Humanity um who were like the prote of Prometheus and so he stole the fire got busted and then was
1:18:46 tied to a rock and every day this creature called a griffin would come and Peck out the liver of Prometheus and then the liver would grow back and the bird would come and peck it out again so a horrible image of Eternal torture so Kiron elected almost like a destiny swap with Prometheus and that's like a kind of process
1:19:33 whereby in a healing in a healing process sometimes the Healer has to truly walk in the moccasins of the one who is seeking the healing and that's a very powerful metaphor for empathy so with the empathy that Chiron showed for Prometheus they were able to kind of change places in the sense that the result was that both of them were freed Chiron was free to die and thus to be immortalized in the constellation of
1:20:20 Centaurus and Prometheus was allowed to to go free um on condition that he wore a crown of Willows that reminded him of his period of enchainment so there are so many so many little niches in that story where one could elaborate the way in which the story of Chiron mirrors so much about the human Journey you know firstly there is a sense in which the feeling of
1:21:07 Abandonment at Birth is very very common you know even with a loving mother and loving father there can be a profound sense not just of being abandoned by the humans but being abandoned by the Divine so we kind of land in this material realm so to speak imbued with a very deep desire to reconnect to get back to the Garden to quote that that song from the 60s and that is really a a fundamental
1:21:53 aspect of our sense of woundedness that we as it were fell from a state of perfection into a material world which is not only far from perfect but where we are extremely vulnerable to being wounded and so it's it's not that the the beginning of the story represents inadequate mothering although that could be included but it's really there for all of us and so you know the the the primary
1:22:38 wound was also inflicted by Hercules and there's a whole substory in that as well and we can see Hercules as a prime representative of the archetype of the hero so he he was you know the the The Greatest Warrior the most successful winner of battles the largest the bravest Etc all in superlatives uh and there is a way in which being overh heroic is something which
1:23:25 does cause wounds and that's not only in the narrow sense of the hero being close to the warrior archetype and warriors go to battle and injure people and get injured and so on it's much deeper than that and I think this is something that has been increasingly coming to light Visa the number of Wars going on on the planet at the moment you know and at the same time more and more awareness of the whole phenomenon of War trauma and you know it's you know
1:24:12 shocking to think of how recently the phrase PT PTSD um was coined before there wasn't even a name for the kind of wounding which warriors were getting when they were away somewhere in war and came home utterly changed without any language really to describe what they were going through now that's all very much changing you know but it was Hercules who fired the arrow that wounded Chiron and many implications that we could think of about that you know
1:24:59 including the fact that it it was the animal part of him which was wounded and of course it's the lower half of his cental body is what connects him with the Earth and so being discovered at the time that Chiron was discovered in other words the late 1970s it's my feeling that that was the symbol of the opening of an eror of really discovering a whole deeper level of of what it is that we do as humans that wounds ourselves and others as well and
1:25:48 some of the basis of that you know so that's all very very poignant and you know in the chart of when Chiron the astrology chart of when Kon was discovered there's only one planet in the element of Earth and that is Kiron itself was discovered in the sign of Taurus and I vividly remember the first time I showed that chart to a class of students and I said you know here here here we are now in the late 1970s Chiron just discovered and if you would
1:26:36 imagine this Chiron this being is bringing us a message what do you think it would be and one lovely young woman shot her hand up and said he's saying this is the only Earth you've got and there was just this hush in the class because that was back in the days when um some of the more shocking and really pointed books and speakers and so forth along the theme of our ecosystem and how
1:27:21 we need to stop damaging it and so forth that was all just really in the beginning stages and now that is really that is really mainstream in terms of awareness and it absolutely wasn't back then but it was it was coming you know and in a very literal way the whole phenomenon of animal communication has absolutely developed since karon was discovered not that it began then because obviously loads and loads of people who work with animals have had that since time immemorial but it wasn't
1:28:07 necessarily named it was just a kind of invisible part of the job you know but that's been named now and it's like accepted and um even it's mainstream that there are people who can communicate with animals like if a pet is distressed and the owner cannot figure out what's going on you know maybe the little creatures already been to the vet nothing wrong Etc but there's something agitating the pet and an animal Communicator will very often be able to communicate directly with the little creature and ask what is
1:28:53 wrong or if they if there's anything that they need and so forth and um you know that's just accepted now that there are people who do that um and also crucially I think people are have been becoming more and more aware collectively of the depth of wisdom that has been lost or suppressed or disrespected or denied on the part of indigenous people all over the world and there are now all kinds of movements to
1:29:39 rehon all of that wisdom and people are genuinely interested um not only in learning about it but in doing reparation work to try and restore some kind of balance with ancient cultures and also there is a way in which the centors refer us to our own ancestry the first picture that I saw of the quer belt was in New Scientist magazine that was 1992 and the caption read something like
1:30:24 described these centur and also the whole cor corer belt as the pristine remains of the origins of the solar system and when I read that I went ah C flash then maybe they also symbolize our own connection with our own pristine [Music] remains and when I had the that flesh it seemed to me that the notion of pristine remains was not only referring to our ancestors but our transformed relationship with those
1:31:10 ancestors so the pristine remains because most people have got very messy stories in their ancestry somewhere and sometimes those stories so need need to be told or honored or worked with and healed that it's like those waves will lamp up on the shore of our own individual lives in the present so in that case this is not about going into the deep past sort of digging up stuff it's about recognizing what has arrived from The ancestral Dimension into the present that may be impacting Our Lives our self-concept who we think we are and so
1:31:58 on and so forth then the pristine remains also has a kind of celestial reference because in many cultures there are stories about how we came from the stars or perhaps after we die we will literally go to the heavens um and how or stories about how stars represent individual wise beings and that kind of thing you know so when I read that little caption in the magazine all of those ideas came to me and as I've worked uh with people ever since
1:32:46 then so that must be 40 years 30 years 40 years something like that I I can see that that that symbolism and that flash that I had are really borne out when one is working in depth with people's individual process you know then also part of the story of Chiron is that he had a wife called sherlo and and there's very little material about her in in the
1:33:31 classics in the mythology which makes it all the more intriguing because then we don't even have much of the Mythic story to go on we've only got a few details and then astrologically speaking it's it's down to Observation again so that's what happened when I connected with Shero the wife of Chiron it suddenly occurred to me that in in the 900 and something years that Chiron was kind of dragging himself around in Mortal Agony as well as fulfilling His function as the great healer and so forth I thought to myself well somebody
1:34:17 must have been looking after him who was looking after him all that time and I thought well you know May maybe it was his wife sherlo and then I had a number of experiences and this really was like the being of sherlo and it sort of came to me in a way that it was very difficult to put the words on but I did have a go and there's an article on my website about her and I just began to you know quite systematically include her in all the charts I was reading I also looked back into my Archive of people for whom I'd read you know even
1:35:04 decades ago and that was how some of the themes kind of came to me CU I could see them actually working in people's lives and that was very thrilling and her orbit is a little bit similar to Chiron except that the orbit of sharo does not go through the orbit of Saturn as does Chiron so she stays nestled in between Saturn and Uranus which has its own rather Charming symbolism so Chiron goes right through the orbit of Saturn and in that sense
1:35:50 can be seen as the breaker upper of established forms which have become too restrictive and like an arrow kind of piercing through the orbit and opening one from being just embedded in the material plane and material kind of perceptions opening one to the um the wider transdimensional world that lives beyond that and so forth and indeed sometimes the movement or the action so to speak of kirant can feel very sharp and very sudden and so forth as if we might become aware of wounds
1:36:38 inside ourself which we've been successfully hiding from our own Consciousness you know and that is as you know that is often a really important part of the healing process and sometimes s that's not fun at all that part but it is it is part of the healing but now sharlo doesn't cross over either of the orbits so far she's the only centor that doesn't cross over one of the one the orbits of one or more of the other planets but she Nestles in between so she seems to be representing an energy which can encompass the
1:37:25 Opposites in a in a quiet way without any sense of of battle or contesting and so forth so she represents a very important dimension of the healing process which we might call in telegram language holding space so the healing space is crucially important in no matter what the style of healing because without that the healing potential healing process is really really limited and
1:38:10 curtailed but with a strong healing field it could be said that you know the the specific techniques which are being used um are not as important as they might be otherwise in other words there could be many different kinds of techniques when placed in a healing field will will all bring huge benefit but without the field maybe much less so
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