Читать книгу Material Girl, Mystical World: The Now-Age Guide for Chic Seekers and Modern Mystics - Ruby Warrington, Ruby Warrington - Страница 9

One of the best things about being a journalist is the deeply random conversations I get to have with complete and utter strangers, many of whom also happen to be semifamous. Like the time I interviewed “plus size” supermodel (ridiculous, she’s like a U.S. size four) Crystal Renn. It was supposed to be a basic Q&A for London’s Stylist magazine, but the first thing Crystal wanted to know when we sat down were my Sun, Moon, and Rising signs. It turns out we were both astrology mad. Soul sister! I thought to myself, as the first thing I usually do when I get asked to interview someone is look up their chart.

Of all the wonders of the Internet, the fact that you can google most celebrities’ birth details will never cease to be a constant source of entertainment for me. And by the way? For the student of astrology, this is also a great way to hone your skills. After all, once you’ve got their birth chart in your hands, the lives, loves, failures, and successes of the A-list are all out there just waiting to be analyzed.

For the uninitiated, your birth chart is essentially a map of the sky, showing the exact position of the planets on the wheel of the astrological zodiac at the moment you were born—that is, the moment your soul chose to incarnate this time around. Each placement of each planet is a window into a different aspect of a person’s personality.

Back to Crystal, who loved astrology because as a model she found herself interacting with new people all day, every day. At every casting, every photo shoot, and every catwalk event, she would be faced with a whole new team—and what better way to break the ice, not to mention work out who the hell you are working with, than a little astrological inquiry? Knowing somebody’s Sun sign (their intrinsic personality), Rising sign (how they come across), and Moon sign (deep-seated emotional needs and how they react to stuff) helped her find her place within the group, work out how to read different individuals, and, on a more advanced level, how best to communicate her own wants and needs. When the people in question (photographer, makeup artist, stylist) were responsible for how she was going to look in the resulting images, not to mention potentially recommend her for the next job, you can see how she’d found this to be a highly valuable life skill.

Sun Sign = Your Intrinsic Personality

Rising Sign = How You Come Across

Moon Sign = Emotional Needs and Responses

And in my book (this book, ha), it’s not only supermodels who can benefit from getting a grip on the basics of astrology. Yes, it’s fun to read a daily, weekly, or month-ahead horoscope for your own Sun sign, but it’s when you learn some of the other key aspects of your chart and then apply this insight to your relationships with your Self and others that things get really interesting.

Astrology tends to get a bad rap from people who assume it’s about trying to “predict” future events—and because it’s based on something as seemingly random as the position of celestial bodies circling the Sun millions of light-years away. In answer to this, (a) I’d like to remind us all for a moment how profoundly our lives are affected by the seasons—not to mention the impact the daily weather forecast has on our mood. And if we can see the influence of the Moon in the ebb and flow of the tides, is it really such a stretch to believe that the other planets in our solar system might also affect life here on Earth? That the “cosmic weather” might also play some kind of role in our lives?

Meanwhile, (b) my take on astrology is that it’s actually a complex language of symbols for describing the intricacies of human nature. After all, for anybody fluent in astro-speak, it’s so much simpler to describe myself as having my “Sun in Aries” than go into a whole riff about how I can be self-interested, but at the same time am deeply loyal; or how I’m a born entrepreneur, prone to risk-taking, with a warrior soul that really, truly, underneath all the ego BS, wants to save the world.

For as far back as I can remember I have been fascinated with the way this mystical language just always seemed to make sense. That is, if I didn’t spend too long trying to wrap my head around the concept that each individual life on Earth is shaped by the position of the planets at our time of birth. But for me, how astrology works isn’t really the point (scientists versus mystics, remember?). I see it more as a tool for personal development, with which to interpret what, why, how, and when certain events, emotional states, and evolutionary processes are presenting in our lives. And all in the name of our evolution/karmic journey.

Yes, astrology can also seem like an extremely navel-gazing pastime. But I think the desire to know yourself and the world you move through better is essentially a drive to be a better, more effective human being. Not that it’s there to be used as a scapegoat, either. Cultivating an awareness of the way certain astrological aspects could influence events is a very different beast to simply blaming all your shortcomings, your just-couldn’t-really-be-assed-to-go-there fuckups, on the stars. This is where the concept of “free will” comes into play, the idea that while we are undoubtedly children of the cosmos and part of the Universal grand plan, we still get the deciding vote as to how our lives play out.

As my astrologer friends Tali and Ophira Edut, better known as the AstroTwins, put it, it helps to see your birth chart as kind of like your “factory settings.” The cosmic blueprint you’re working off in this lifetime.

How you then go about constructing your life depends on all sorts of external factors, including the people you meet, the opportunities you’re presented with, and, ultimately, the decisions you make. But having that original blueprint on file to refer to is a great way to ensure that the foundations remain solid. As such, when you study the language of astrology as a tool for personal development, learning the basics of interpreting your own chart is a really great place to start. With this information at your fingertips, I guarantee you’ll be granted a whole new perspective on your life, your relationships, and, yes, your karmic destiny.

It was the fabulous AstroTwins who lifted the lid on chart interpretation for me. Tali, who met and married her husband at Burning Man, studies shamanism in her spare time, and Ophira, whenever I visit her apartment in the East Village, has a pack of Angel cards out on the table. But they also write the horoscopes for ELLE and appear as regulars on The Real Housewives—in other words, they’re a pair of Mystical Girls, making some seriously magical waves in the Material World.

Numinati alert! I thought when we first connected. (The “Numinati” being my affectionate term for my Numi coven.) And when I then discovered they were leading a Become Your Own Astrologer retreat in Tulum, Mexico, that summer, I knew I would move heaven and earth, not to mention all the freaking constellations in the zodiac, to be there.

This is where I first got a proper handle on basic birth chart interpretation, using what the Twins refer to as the “three-part puzzle” for examining each “aspect”—or planetary placement in non-astro-speak—in a chart. More on this to come. It was also where I got my first taste of comparing two people’s charts (another of the Twins’ pet subjects)—in the process uncovering some home truths about my chart in relationship to my mum’s, for example, that have gone on to shape the way we understand and therefore communicate with each other, taking our mother-daughter connection to a whole other, more forgiving, level. Big stuff. And yet more fuel to my already burning astrological obsession.