Toward Ecosophy

I find myself in an odd position in today's astrological scene. Of the astrologers I know or know of, nearly all fall into one of two camps. There are the up-to-date modern astrologers, studying and practicing the psychologically oriented, choice-centered astrology launched by Dane Rudhyar in the middle years of the twentieth century and elaborated in many directions since then, and then there are the traditional astrologers, for whom anything much more recent than William Lilly is not of interest. 

Me, I've got Uranus in the first house of my natal chart, and that means the road less traveled is always my route of choice. The astrology I find most congenial is the sort of thing that was practiced between the two epochs just listed: specifically the astrology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century occult-influenced scene. I posted a little while back about Ivy Goldstein-Jacobson, who's one of the writers I study most closely; another is the genial Llewellyn George, whose A-Z Horoscope Maker and Delineator (get one of the old editions, before it was revised by the current copyright holders) is as important to that end of astrology as Israel Regardie's The Golden Dawn is to the comparable traditions in Hermetic occultism. 

One of the many things that sets these writers apart from most of those before and after them, in turn, is that they use parallels of declination. 

(Those of my readers who aren't astrology geeks will want to skip the next paragraph.)

As seen from Earth, the sun, moon, and planets move along a belt of sky called the ecliptic, and the degrees of the zodiac are measured along the ecliptic. When two planets are conjunct in the 14th degree of Aquarius, that means that they're both at that point along the ecliptic circle. That's one set of motions that astrology tracks. The other, declination, tracks the movements of planets up and down relative to the celestial equator. (Think of ponies on a merry-go-round: they go in a circle, but they also rise and fall.) When two planets are at the same distance above or below the celestial equator, they're in what astrologers call a parallel of declination; they can both be on the same side of the equator or one can be above and one below, but if they're both (say) 14 degrees of declination from the celestial equator, they're in parallel.

(Okay, the non-geeks can come back into the room.) 

Parallels of declination have roughly the same effect, astrologically speaking, as conjunctions, but tend to be a little quieter and spread out over a longer period of time. You can use them in every kind of astrology, and in my experience they explain things that other factors don't. 

For example, looking at my chart and my wife's together, if you don't consider parallels, it's by no means obvious why we should have tumbled into a relationship within days of moving into the same student household, gotten married a couple of years later, and thirty-three years after the wedding date we're still happily married. There's some good synastry -- that's what you call relationships between two charts -- but without the parallels, it's a matter of "huh?" Look at parallels, though -- our two moons are in parallel, and her Venus and my Jupiter are parallel as well as conjunct. making for a really strong connection -- and it changes from "huh?" to "duh!"

I'm far from sure why parallels got dropped from modern astrology, and even less sure why they don't seem to have a role in traditional astrology. More research needed...