Random Patterns

thoughts on astrology and card readings: one ordered and predictable (the movement of planets), one apparently random (the fall of the cards)

I do card readings as my day job, at a metaphysical shop in Courtenay. Twice a week, Tuesday and Thursday I spread the cards and translate their stories for pay. It's an unusual way to make a living, I know.

As an astrologer, my mind functions along particular lines of logic. I began doing card readings informally and it took years to find some comfort with the unerring (and eerie) way  the cards tell the universally correct story for each person at the time of the reading.

I've been privileged to be present at the moment of choice, when people, guided by the clear tale told by the cards (that they can see for themselves, as I simply translate what is there), realize what they, of course, were going to do all along, but hadn't quite accepted yet. Major life decisions have been made by people using the guidance I am able to provide. I find that humbling.

As an astrologer, I distrusted the random chance element in card readings for a long time, but that was before I came to recognize the simple presence of magic in everyday life and to recognize its astrological logic (the impeccable perfection of the apparently random fall of the cards belongs to Virgo, mutable earth: the consciousness of matter).

As a card reader, I have learned to rely upon that magic re-occurring, and it does. This slow unfolding ephiphany has transformed my way of doing life and has also served to help me evolve my understanding and practice of astrology.

I feel astrology overarches, and contains within it, all forms of divination and understanding that are not sourced in the vast movements of the planetary and luminary bodies and their corresponding collective archetypal forces.

The divine language of the cosmos can't be placed in the same category, in my opinion, as the random fall of painted pieces of cardboard. The efficacy of divination through chance can be elegantly explained and thoroughly grasped using astrology with a solid understanding of the four elements and their interactions.

All of astrology, and all of reality, render down to the four fundamental principles. The four elements are Fire, Water, Air and Earth. These elements correspond to the four parts of the Self:

• Fire = the creative spirit, drive, self-identity, 'I Am', consciousness
• Water = the emotional body, memory, the past, the psyche, the dreamworld
• Air = the mind, thoughts and communications, relationships, 'otherness'
• Earth = the body, the practical world, work, career, material things

Their modes and means of combining in different ways has resulted in the apparent complexity of the mutually exclusive domains of worldly society (air), the interdependent ecology of Earth (water), the Newtonian laws of matter (earth), and the collective creative spirit (fire).

These four elemental domains are inescapable, inevitable, obvious and easy to understand. No other system of understanding can describe the multiplicity of possibilities as concisely, clearly and craftily as can the system of astrology.

Astrology is the real mathematics of chaos; divination using randomly occurring symbology is chaos in action.

Through astrology, I have come to understand that there is, truly, no such thing as either chaos or death. What appears to be chaotic proves profoundly meaningful when it is examined with an open mind, and all experiences of death imply the rebirth that emerges from it. On Earth, everything is recycled, including consciousness.

If you bend me, I'll bend
If you break me, I'll break
If you drown me, I'll drown
Then I'll become the lake
Death, what can you do?
Your days of power are through.

by Bee Wolf Ray - June 26, 2010

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