Learning Astrology
My first contact with a birth chart ocurred during my spiritual journey in India, in 2003. I took a night train from New Delhi to Mumbai, and the indian businessmen with whom I shared the compartment spent the whole evening having fun with their birth charts. I couldn't understand a word of what they were saying in Hindi, and they didn't want to waste their time trying to explain their ancient art-science to an ignorant tourist. However, a few weeks later, a silk merchant in Varanasi took me to his astrologer who drew my Jyotish birth chart on a piece of paper after looking at his ephemerides. Some of his predictions turned out to be accurate, which was very disturbing. Upon my return, I had a long series of consultations with Irène Andrieu that allowed me to immerse myself in astrology's way of thinking.
The time to start learning astrology came in 2011. During an intense period of self-exploration, I read Luc Bigé's astrology and mythology books and started learning psychological astrology with Françoise Sentier by practicing on my own birth chart. She had studied at the Centre for Psychological Astrology in London and I'm deeply appreciative of her therapeutic awareness. Throughout 2012-2013, while studying coaching, I followed Luc Bigé's monthly seminars, and started practicing on my friends's birth charts. In 2014, I looked into the birth charts of dozens of jazz musicians and started drawing a timeline of the history of jazz correlated with the "dance of the planets". By the end of the year my Astrodienst database had exceeded 100 charts and I purchased the extended storage for 1000 charts.
In 2015, I learned about the origins and the history of astrology, which motivated me to learn hellenistic astrology. I consulted Demetra George and Robert Hand who introduced me to whole sign houses. That summer, while in Bali, I contacted the late Alan Oken and he invited me to his house for a cup of tea, which I'll never forget. In 2016, Kenneth Bowser's historical perspective on precession inspired me to try the sidereal zodiac. While reading André Barbault's series of books about the signs of the zodiac, I compared dozens of birth charts with tropical/sidereal settings , until I eventually switched to the sidereal zodiac.
Througout 2017 and 2018 I took a step back from astrology.
In 2019, I became increasingly interested in understanding what the upcoming Jupiter-Saturn conjunction of 2020 would look like. I started looking at the previous conjunctions and decided to focus on the triple Jupiter-Saturn conjunction of 1940-41. That's how I wrote my first articles about the lives of F.D. Roosevelt and Emperor Hirohito, about the zeitgeist of the years 1940-41 and about the nature of Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions. During the writing process I realized the importance of the 1941 stellium of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus, which led me to search for the stellia of the giant planets. Furthermore, my immersion in the history of World War II inspired me to learn about the history of the Age of Discovery, and to write a timeline of maritime empires that follows the thread of Uranus-Neptune conjunctions, which changed my perspective on globalization.
In early 2020, I set myself the challenge of looking at the aspect figures formed by the intertwined cycles of three giant planets, instead of reserching another synodic cycle between a pair of planets. I was interested in the digital revolution and I noticed that Apple was founded between 1976 and 1977, during a T-square of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus which coincided with remarkable transits on Steve Jobs' birth chart. The exploration of Jobs' biography led me to look backwards at the history of computers and to realize that planetary cycles provide a fertile perspective on the history of many modern artefacts such as the bicycle and the printing press. I was becoming increasingly aware that artefacts can be used as a thread to learn cultural history. At the same time, by following Patrick Boucheron's lectures at Collège de France and his remarkable programs Making history, I started to undertand that history itself is a cultural artefact.
In 2021, I carefully listened to the in-depth biography of Steve Jobs written by Walter Isaacson. It made a strong impression on me and I decided to look closer into Jobs' birth chart and the transits throughout his life. This work led me to write three articles:
"Steve Jobs' cycles of creativity", published on astro.com in October 2022.
"The history of computers and the digital revolution", published in the September/October 2022 issue of The Astrological Journal.
"The information age", to be published in the November/December 2022 issue of The Astrological Journal.