DOES ASTROLOGY DENY FREE WILL?

This piece is adapted from my 2020 book StarGates: Essays on Astrology, Symbolism and the Synchronistic Universe.

One of the criticisms commonly leveled against astrology concerns the thorny question of free will. If our lives are somehow influenced or even predetermined by the stars, the argument goes, does that mean we have no real choice, and we’re little more than puppets manipulated by some overarching cosmic fate?

The simple answer to that is, no—not exactly, anyway. A helpful analogy to explain this point is a simple weather forecast. When the weatherperson on TV announces there will be rain during the coming weekend, you have a wide range of options in how to react to that news. You can choose to stay in and watch TV, sit and meditate, play with your dog, or even go out and enjoy a walk in the rain. An astrological prediction is a bit like that, in that you may not have total control over the planetary “weather patterns” affecting your life, but you have considerable free will in how you respond to them.

For me, an even better analogy may be that of sheet music. Give a musical score to two different musicians, one of a jazz artist and the other a classically- trained pianist, and the odds are they’ll play it very differently, even though they’re looking at the same notes. Indeed, the jazz musician might improvise wildly around those basic notes on that sheet music, in the process transforming that work into something nearly unrecognizable at times. Just as with that piece of sheet music, you can “play the notes” of your horoscope in a variety of different ways—or even improvise around its themes and create something wildly different from what appears on paper. That’s why two different individuals born at the same time in the same city can wind up leading surprisingly different lives, although there will be certain structural commonalities between them.

Another key to understanding this point is the fact that astrology speaks in a language of symbols, and for that reason there are “octaves of meaning” involved. For example, a Mars-Mercury square in the chart of a five-year-old will not manifest the same as it will for that person when they’re 70 years old. They’ll experience that basic energy but at different levels of expression, some considerably more constructive than others. It would be ludicrous to propose a singular, fixed prediction for how a pattern like that would manifest for someone without knowing the level of maturity or experience they’ll bring to it. Symbols are multi-leveled, and we experience and express them in widely different ways, sometimes within the same lifetime.

That goes for transits and progressions, too. If that same five- year old were to have transiting Jupiter come along and conjunct his or her natal Venus, he/she might fall in love with the new puppy that mom and dad brought home; or perhaps feel delighted at the new toy received as a special gift. But at the age of 45, transiting Jupiter on that same natal Venus might manifest as getting married, going on a trip to Paris, or even making a killing at the roulette tables! It’s the same archetypal symbolism, but at different levels and forms of expression.

Here is an experience from my own practice which hit that point home for me in a particularly fascinating way, while underscoring the role that choice plays in how we relate to our horoscopes.

I had two clients come to me separately who were born within days of one another, who had extremely similar charts. As it so happened, they both experienced the effects of transiting Saturn over their natal Neptunes around the same time, just one week apart, before meeting me. I asked each of them what happened that previous week to find out how that Saturn transit had manifested for them. The first one sheepishly admitted he was arrested for drunk driving, while the second one said that he joined Alcoholics Anonymous in order to quit drinking!

Think about that for a second.

Very similar planetary symbolism was at work in both cases, but in the one case the client chose to manifest that energy from the inside out, as it were, by using his Saturnian discipline to take control of his Neptunian escapism, while the other client wound up letting that symbolism manifest from the outside in, by not using discipline and letting the outside world manifest it for him.

It reminds me of the old line by Carl Jung: “When an inner situation is not made conscious it appears outwardly as fate.” So despite the similarities in their charts and transits, they chose to manifest those patterns in dramatically different ways, one more constructively, the other more destructively.

So when it comes to astrology and free will, it’s all a matter of balance. One way or another, the energies of our horoscopes will manifest, that’s true, but there is an element of choice in how we respond to those energies, and what forms they’ll take. Or as Richard Tarnas once put it, “Astrology is not concretely predictive, but archetypally predictive.”

Ray Grasse is a writer, astrologer, and photographer living in the American Midwest. He is author of ten books, including The Waking Dream, Under a Sacred Sky, and An Infinity of Gods. His websites are www.raygrasse.com and www.raygrassephotography.com.