I was wondering about that, how the meanings are generated in astrology?
How or if every astrologer has its own meanings, or at least nuances of the meanings?
Can it be compared with the tarot practice, where every reader could follow a system or (and) develop their own meaning?
Or the intuition is not so much involved in astrology, which is more of a scholarly occupation, reading some good astrologers, decide on a system and meaning to follow and practicing with charts?
For the classical seven, meanings can be traced back to prehistoric times. That's not to say that those meaning haven't changed over the last few thousand years, they have but not by a massive amount. Mars and Saturn are still seen as potentially difficult planets and Venus and Jupiter are still seen as potentially beneficial planets. The Moon is still seen as relating to instinctive reactions, changeability and the feminine. Mercury is still seen as relating to communications. to tricks (think of the modern view of Mercury Retrograde) and to divination (Mercury was/is the messenger of the gods, and therefore brings messages to those who can read them. That's why Mercury rules Astrology, not Uranus. The Sun is now seen more of an indicator of personality or the person (I'm a Libra She's a Scorpio) whereas before the Sun was more a general indicator of the strength or weakness of the nativity and the capacity of a person to realise their aims or their will, if you like.
It's not surprising that those meanings changed in the sense of more meanings being acquired or elaborated. The planets as rulers of objects, animals, plants, countries and virtually anything you can think of grew as humanity became more civilised and technology became more complex. And these rulers were not mutually exclusive. And that's the first type of area where Astrologers took different rulers because they emphasised a different characteristic of an object or animal. If you think about it most objects have several characteristics or properties, so for example, take a black car. Black is a Saturnian characteristic but a car is used for travel, and that's a Mercury characteristic. So who rules a black car. If we think the property of transport is more important then its Mercury but if it's being black that we think is most important, then we might go for Saturn.
When we get to virtually all the rest of the bodies used in Astrology, fixing a meaning is different. Up to a moment in time, they were unknown, so possessed no meaning. When they do become known it's a matter of deciding which meanings, currently held by other planets, should be transferred. Virtually all the characteristics of Neptune used to be allocated to the Moon and Venus (usually their bad sides), There's evidence, though disputed that Alan Leo decided on the meaning of Neptune and that others followed him to the point that it became the modern accepted meaning. He claimed to get the meaning through scrying.
The answer to the second part of this question is that like Tarot an Astrolgoer brings her or his perceptions and intuitionto judgement. There's an excellent book by Geoffery Cornelius called
The Moment of Astrology
in which he argues that it's not just rules that determine judgement, we have to allow for the Astrologer too. The balance though is different from Tarot. The rules still provide a framework in which judgment is made. To an extent this holds with Tarot, there are 78 cards made up of four suits and the major arcana. These provide a structure, you can't introduce new cards (or you can but is it still Tarot). However the greater variety of deck designs and the variety of spreads give the reader more flexibility to impose their own perceptions and intuitions on the cards.
In Astrology there is still scope for intuitive leaps but they rest more in recognising patterns and extrapolating them without hard evidence to a new situation. If your interested there's a discussion between Geoffery Cornelius and Chris Brennan which ranges over this and other issues.
http://theastrologypodcast.com/2015/11/24/geoffrey-cornelius-moment-of-astrology/
Scroll down and you'll find that you can play the file or download it to play later.
daphne said:
Why zero? Is there a rush to introduce new bodies in astrology? Why? Hype?
There's no feeling that we haven't got enough bodies LOL. The issue seems to be more along the lines of;
'Oh Astronomers have just discovered this new body, it must mean something (and that something is usually derived from it's name, or the god/goddess it was named after), so let's get an ephemeris and start using it.'
If you look at discoveries from Pluto on, astrological use quickly followed astronomic discovery, with very little intervening time (especially once an ephemeris was available).
Alan Leo was a Theosophist and believed not only in the New Age but in the development of the human spirit or soul. His influence is still strong and you will find Astrologers who claim that new planets are discovered when they are needed for human development and that the future is inherently better than the past because it is the path of human development and the evolution of the soul. If you believe that then new planets are inherently attractive as indicators of another stage in human development,
Much of the ideas of the New Age are accepted by Astrologers (though by no means all) but they conveniently forget that Alan Leo also believed that a new home was being built for evolved souls on the planet Venus and also dismissed most of human kind as being at a much lower level of evolution than himself. Thus he felt that the good side of Uranus and Neptune was reseved for him and his fellow evolved souls and the worst side was there for everyone else.
I hope Dave's going to make a contribution here because I'm sure he'll raise different issues and take a different line on much of this.
