More about Astropoetics

Astropoetics is an approach to astrology that understands everyday life to be a rich repository of meaningful images

When these images are correlated with the appropriate astrological patterns, they provide a point of entry into an intimately personal understanding of the birthchart and the life it describes.  Unlike traditional astrology, astropoetics does not strive toward an interpretation of the birthchart.  Instead it approaches the birthchart as a window in both time and psychic space through which the soul can be observed gradually learning how to move toward a more complete embrace of its wholeness.

Astropoetics differs from astrology in several additional ways

While traditional astrology understands the birthchart to be a signature of fate, an astropoetic approach to astrology understands fate to be but an elaborate opportunity for evolution of consciousness within the embodied state. This opportunity is a learning process that transcends traditional astrological judgments about good and bad placements, benefic and malefic signatures, and the relative ease or difficulty of birthcharts considered in their entirety.

Astropoetics assumes that each chart is an expression of Creative Intelligence at work

The birth chart delineates the optimum path to conscious embodiment for the soul to which it belongs. Astropoetics further assumes that what becomes of the potential for good or ill that is harbored within the symbolism of any birthchart depends entirely upon the individual soul, whose consciousness is channeled through the chart.

Signs and Symbols

While traditional astrology is largely a matter of rationally decoding signs that have become shorthand notation for known qualities, astropoetics is oriented more toward the discovery of unknown sensory, emotional, psychological, mythological and spiritual correlates to symbols, and of the images that embody these correlates.

The process is by nature an intimate journey into unfamiliar territory, and the outcome is not something that can be predetermined according to standardized definitions for astrological symbols. Traditional astrology aims at an objective understanding of the symbolism. Astropoetics assumes that the symbolism must be referenced to both an astrological context (the birthchart considered as a whole) and a subjective life context that is unique to the individual soul, before it can mean anything at all.

Causal vs Relational

To the extent that traditional astrology strives to be scientific, it will adopt science's insistence on causal explanations for its interpretations, even if the language that it uses emphasizes individual choice. Astrologers that are sensitive to this issue might say as Paracelsus did, for example, that "the stars incline; they do not compel." Actually the stars do nothing but provide an endlessly intriguing mirror to the idiosyncratic organization of soul space.

Instead of attempting to articulate the causal relationship between heaven and earth, however euphemistically it might be phrased, astropoetics assumes instead that everything astrological is a reflection of an interconnected web of resonant relationships, which reflect back to the individual soul who it is and where it belongs within the grand design of the Greater Whole of which it is part.

These relationships are not causal in nature, but expressions of natural metaphorical logic. Our lives are reflected by our birthcharts, not because the arrangement of planets in the sky at the time of our birth causes us to be who we are, but because it reflects a larger pattern in which we participate and with which we share a natural affinity.

The entire web of relationships encompassed by this pattern is suggested astrologically by the interconnected nature of the birthchart, which mirrors the coherent internal logic of subjective soul space. Each resonant relationship within the pattern evolves cyclically through soul time, as it is reflected astrologically in the various cycles of planets that are connected by aspect in soul space.

While traditional astrology tends to understand the birthchart as a static description of personality undergoing a series of discrete events, astropoetics views it instead as descriptive of a process that deepens and transmutes in cyclical time as increasing awareness is brought to the experience of embodiment it describes.

Suffering and Spirit

Lastly, while traditional astrology – at least that which is psychologically oriented – strives toward an understanding of the human predicament and an alleviation of suffering through a more enlightened perspective, astropoetics aims a bit higher.

Astropoetics strives toward an understanding of how the human predicament is thoroughly infused by the presence of Spirit. This is true, especially where the human predicament is most difficult, most painful, most intensely vulnerable, and where the seemingly intractable core issues that mark the embodied life are encountered.

Without attempting to romanticize or otherwise dismiss the suffering inherent in such experiences, astropoetics aims toward a vision broad and deep enough to encompass them as the portals to a deeper, more conscious and more creative embodiment of Spirit that they ultimately are.

Taken to its highest potential, Astropoetics not only describes the web of relationships that together comprise the soul space in which we live. It also shows us how to live – how and when to apply our creative intelligence in order to play a more conscious part in the evolution of collective soul space, as we take our place within the grand design, so that together we might open a larger portal through which Spirit can reveal itself in the embodied world that we share.

Recommended Reading: Books by Joe Landwehr

The Seven Gates of Soul: Reclaiming the Poetry of Everyday Life  outlines a 6000-year history of ideas about the soul from religion, eastern and western, western philosophy, science, psychology and astrology that pose barriers to our actual experience of the soul.  It then shows how an astropoetic approach to astrology can transcend these barriers.

Tracking the Soul With An Astrology of Consciousness is a system of spiritual psychology, integrating astrology with the chakra system.  It introduces a strategy for approaching the birthchart as a nuanced set of evolutionary opportunities, rather than a broad pronouncement of fate.

Astrology and the Archetypal Power of Number: A Contemporary Reformulation of Pythagorean Number Theory (to be published in 2010) explores the qualitative dimension of number as one primary source of astropoetic imagery.  It shows how Pythagorean number theory and the astrochakra system introduced in Tracking the Soul combine to reveal a collective psychology at work underneath the movement of human history.