How do the planets influence us?

[Charles]

I’ve been diving deeper into astrology lately and the more I learn the more it clicks. But I suppose I’m wondering how exactly the placements of the planets affect us?
Who determined that the 9th house represents travel, philosophy and learning languages?
How do we know that Aquarius is the humanitarian? Etc.

I was listening to a podcast the other day that had on Debra Silverman (a really cool astrologer I just found out about!), and she mentioned something about the person’s chart, how Uranus is somewhere and Uranus rules electricity because it was discovered when electricity was discovered. This idea made sense to me and I want to learn more about that!
I guess I really want to know more about the how and the why of things.

And yes I’m a Virgo sun lol

Discussion

[yinay727]

I personally believe it is from observation. People noticed that if you were born in part of the year, you tended to have certain traits. And the zodiac was originally a calendar that started from the spring equinox.

[My_moon_and_stars]

While it is certainly true that every heavenly globe and star in the visible universe exerts some form of electromagnetic influence on the earth, I think most astrologers would agree that astrology is not a study of cause and effect. Rather, astrology is the study of change, more specifically, the study of time – afterall, time is simply a linear unfolding of change itself, as perceived by us from the earth.

So when you look at an astrology chart, a better question might be: what time is it? The clock striking 6am doesn’t “cause” you to wake up – lol it does if you set your alarm clock. But you choose to wake up at that time. The sun at daybreak is an indication of our behavior to wake up and start the day, and one can make informed predictions about the behavior of people by knowing what happens at certain times of day or seasons of the year. We easily see how the sun shapes our patterns of behavior throughout the day and the seasons. Nature also has woven a biological clock within us that corresponds to the time indicated by the other planetary positions.

In meditation the other day, this quote came through and I felt compelled to write it down and to share it here: “Free will is the mechanism by which the archetypal language of the stars is translated into cause and effect in the material world.” Another way to put it, the stars tell you about the karmic weather. The choice in how to respond to that weather is your own.

As the bible says, there is a season for all things.

[kara_anna]

Great question! Building astrological meanings has mostly been a mixture of pattern recognition, rationalization, and synchronicity. (That’s all coupled with a belief that observable objects in the material world can even function as symbols in this way.) Once initial structures get built, further meaning then naturally flows from reading within that structure. Astrology’s gone through many iterations, incorporating what came before it in some ways but placing it within a new framework, like Hellenistic astrology did with with Babylonian and Egyptian astrology. Reading texts about the history of astrology will describe astrology’s chronology.

Although astrology is most likely real — in that these energies aren’t just our imagination — how we’ve made sense of it has always been just our explanations. At no point is our explanation astrology itself. Explanations are intermediaries. So it’s important to keep in mind that an individual and culture’s consciousness will structure the explanations that make sense to them. Explanations shift and various ones can help us hear astrology’s message.

So some people will consider synchronicity a valid way to understand a planet, like the example you gave with Uranus. Other people will consider the context of the discovery’s era meaningless for the planet’s nature, that Uranus can’t be said to be connected with electricity, reasoning that transcends convention, or freeing the self from tyranny or absolutism, just bc those were markers of that era. Likewise, they’ll say Neptune can’t be connected with transcendentalism and Romanticism, and Pluto can’t be connected with atomic power. Other people will see those synchronicities as valid starting points to then finetune through observation of patterns. (Asteroids are thought by many who use them to operate on a principle similar to synchronicity, where the name itself describes its function.)

[StellaGraphia]

If you really enjoy digging in, and having the info to analyze, and enjoying learning the history, then I’d suggest Chris Brennan’s 700 page book: Hellenistic Astrology (print and on google play). I think it would hit all those things for you.

It goes into a lot of history, so you’ll get a lot of your “why’s” answered. And then also goes into how to actually use astrology, lots of techniques, etc. Plus, you’ll have lots of further resources that are stated, to explore if you wish.

[donotduplicate_]

Early astronomers began to notice that there was a relation between sky and human behavior. They observed that two people born of the same sign share similar qualities. The reason why it gets debunked is because when you teach someone that their sign is about their own behavior, you can’t tell the difference between whether they act like their sign because they were made aware about it or if it’s actually a part of their natures. Ironically, what we learn about astrology can muddy the findings of astrology because anyone can act even more like their sign when they figure out what it is and how the sign behaves.

[GarunixReborn]

Well they do affect us in a couple ways

* seeing them through a telescope makes you feel small
* hearing about new discoveries involving them excites us and makes us more curious

other than that, they really dont do anything at all