The World’s Second Oldest Profession, And Why It Works

by Garrett Coulson,
Contributing Writer,In5D.com

One fine morning in May, just before dawn, when I was ten, my Aunt Aurora took me up to the top of Dead Horse Butte, and told me I was now at the age when young shamans need to learn about Metaphysics. “I think,” she said, “we’ll start with the world’s second oldest profession.”

She’d brought with her an apple pie sliced into twelve sections. “There are twelve signs in the zodiac,” she said. “Well, that’s not actually true. There are actually thirteen. But we’ll get into all that later. After we talk about Pisces. “ Each of the slices had a number etched into it from one to twelve. She pointed to the slice with the number twelve on it. “The section of thirty degrees above the eastern horizon is the 12th house. The section of thirty degrees below the horizon is the 1st house. And right where the horizon is, that’s the ascendant. That first house below it, whatever sign it happens to b e – right now it happens to be Taurus – that’s called the rising sign. The rising sign changes every two hours. Any questions?”

“What’s the world’s oldest profession?” I said.

“We’ll discuss that,” she said, “when we get to the sign of Scorpio.”

Right about that time, the sun peeked over the horizon. Taurus rising, sun on the ascendant.

And so my metaphysical education had begun.

Every day, after my home-schooling in Metaphysics was finished, my Aunt Aurora would turn on the small black and white TV we had in the trailer we lived in, and watch a show called BEYOND REASON, on the CBC – the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation – the one and only channel most TV sets received, in the towns and ranches dotting the badlands prairie on either side of the border between Montana and Saskatchewan. This was back in the year JFK was blown away, by forces that remain mysterious still.

On BEYOND REASON, three psychics would try to guess the identity of a mystery guest. Irene Hughes, a psychic, was in the left glass cubicle; the middle cubicle was reserved for a guest psychic, a palmist, a clairvoyant, clairaudient, an object sentient, a channeler, whatever and whoever; and in the third cubicle was the astrologer, Geoff Grey-Cobb. Using just birth time, birthday, and birth place, and a few probing questions, he seemed to come up with the correct identity of the mystery guest first, more often than not, or so it seemed to me, and I wondered why that was.

“So why does astrology work?” I asked Aunt Aurora, during a commercial break.

She thought about it for a long minute, until finallyshe said, “We all have a job to do when we enter this incarnation. A sacred contract that we have to fulfill. Your job is to find out why it is astrology works, and then come back and tell me all about it.”

I was wrong but I was old enough to know the scent of cow manure when I smelt it, and there was definite whiff of something that could make the spring flowers pop up from their seed pods and dance.

But at the same time, some inner voice whispered into my inner ear that the more interesting choice, of all the choices scattered before me like the molecules dancing in front of me on the television screen, courtesy of invisible cathode rays, was to take Aunt Aurora at her word.

Everyone, after all, needs a mission in life.

During a rebirthing session in my Aunt Aurora’s flotation tank, I walked through a door that had the symbol of the Archer on it, and I saw myself in India, standing outside a temple that glistened gold under a bright afternoon sun, I felt, intuitively, it was a glimpse of my future.

Sagittarius is the sign where my lunar north node resides, and, as any dime-store astrologer will tell you, the moon’s north node, it’s north pole, if you will, is where information resides about one’s Path in Life.

Sagittarius is the sign that rules the planet’s many belief systems, greener pastures, higher education, foreign lands. Make that, the universe’s many belief systems, since I have it on good authority that we are not alone in the universe. And I’m not talking about Stephen Hawking.

In the spring of 1978, I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English, which isn’t of much use for anything, and so I decided to follow the impulses of the north node in Sagittarius, and see what sort of education some major traveling might impart. This after I walked past a poster in the window of a travel agency, in downtown Saskatoon, advertising a bus tour that went from London overland to Kathmandu in seventy brisk days, starting on September 22nd..

At the time, I had no idea where the country named Iran was.

But I certainly did, about the time that we traversed Turkey, and found ourselves on the border of a country in the midst of a major, and violent, revolution. There were riots in the streets. They were burning Exxon stations and KFC outlets.

The Shah of Iran was in cahoots with American oil companies, neither of whom were inclined to share the wealth with the country’s population.

The thirty-five passengers on this rock and roll high school on wheels – not a soul over the age of thirty-five, tour policy – were given, by the driver and tour guide, an exercise in democracy, i.e. a vote to either go through Iran, or turn back.

All of one vote decided that we would go through.

The option was there that if you didn’t want to go through, you could turn back yourself. But, of course, you’d be on your own. Three people did take that option.

The bus did get fire-bombed one night, where we were parked in Mashad.

But we were able to fix it, and carry on, into Afghanistan, in the midst of a slow and insidious invasion by the Russians, and we finally succeeded in making it to India.

India, where I discovered that, in certain Hindu circles, marriages are often arranged purely upon the compatibility of the birth charts.

I found a book called The Marriage of the Sun and Moon, in a little second hand bookshop in the Chandni Chowk, in New Delhi, which put forward the idea that if you find someone who’s natal sun is on your moon, or vice versa, that person could very well be your soul-mate. Which is why people of the Hindu spiritual persuasion have their zodiac charts cast before marriage.

Since my last lesson about astrology – all about the lost zodiac sign of Ophiuchus, which isn’t really lost at all, it’s still up there sailing along in the ecliptic, between Scorpio and Sagittarius, where’s it’s always been – I’ve kept my eyes peeled to the far horizon, my ear close to the ground, my finger on the pulse of the Cosmos, for the answer to that question I asked Aunt Aurora, back when we were watching Beyond Reason, in the middle of a badlands nowhere.

I’ve been known to go up to astrologers, world famous astrologers, in conference bookstores, or after lectures, and ask them, point blank, why astrology works. Mostly what I get in return was blank stares.

Every once in a while, somebody would point me in a certain direction. Check out Talbot, they’d say. Or: Percy Seymour’s your man.

And what I’ve come up with, after all that, is most definitely just a glimmering in the pit of a black hole that’s buried in the wisp of a peanut shell blowing down some dark black hole in some even darker back alley of the Milky Way, of some metaphysical truth that will, perhaps, be common knowledge in a hundred years time, when the long suppressed truth finally sees – as all suppressed truths must, eventually, by definition – find the light of day. When, it says here, in the Akashic Records, astrologers will rule the world. (If they don’t already. It is whispered, in certain corners, that millionaires don’t use astrologers, billionaires do, and a lot of them walk the streets of Wall Street; do not forget that Nancy Reagan’s astrologer, Joan Quigley, made sure Ronnie’s decisions and actions were timed and plotted just so, by celestial wisdom…..)

I must start with the quandary that plagues most astrologers today, a little bit of business about the precession of the equinoxes, which is responsible for all this hoopla about how we’re moving into the age of Aquarius right now (and have been, ever since the lyrics to a certain Broadway song were written, or Bob Dylan was born, or when the telephone was invented or Kitty Hawk first took flight or when Uranus, which rules Aquarius, moved into Aquarius, back in April, 1995, or, or, or….and how the signs just aren’t where they used to be, thanks to the tilt of the global axis and the movement of our solar system around the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy. Precessional changes mean that whereas at the time of ancient Sumerians (who, by the way, knew that Uranus and Neptune were out there; see the works of Zechariah Sitchin…..), the sun would physically have been in Aries, at the spring equinox; it is now, however, twenty-three degrees earlier, framed by the Piscean fishes, the tail of one, the snout of the other, to be exact, as well as the pail that the water-bearer, Aquarian maiden, is lifting from the well. Astrologers who use the Porphyry chart system know all this. The fact that other astrologers still call the first sign in spring, Aries, and not Pisces, is a convention that has not changed, because, well, traditions die hard, doncha know?

And this is one of the reasons scientists dismiss astrology as a pseudo-science at best.

Of course, if we were going to be sticklers, we would have to include in our zodiac maps every constellation that lies along the ecliptic, which would mean that we would have to include the lost sign of Ophiuchus. And we’d also match to the size of each sign to the size of the constellations themselves instead of a uniform thirty degrees each.

And, yes, of course, there is a chart system for that too – there are exactly enough different zodiac chart systems to make your head spin three hundred and fifty-nine degrees.

But, really, how many different chart systems can one – and this is in quotes – can one so-called “pseudo-science” hold?

There might only be one explanation for this: what’s important in astrology is not the starry background of the zodiac, which in fact acts only as a clock face, but some cycle related to the sun itself. In other words, the crux as to why astrology works lies somewhere in the orb of that sun in the sky, and the way that the angles that the planets make in relationship to the sun, not the starry backdrop that they spin against. That sun which the ancient Mayans used to worship so ferociously. That angry god. Which acts so angry, every 26,000 years or so. Which is when the solar system, just like clockwork, goes through an area of the Milky Way Galaxy that is the heart of a giant comet’s tail that passed through these parts shortly after the Big Bang, relatively speaking, at least, and all that cosmic debris hitting the sun causes massive solar flares to erupt, so much so that it’s been known to undergo a magnetic pole shift, or, even worse, an actual physical pole shift, which, in turn, causes all the planets in the solar system to undergo polar shifts as well, magnetic and physical.

It’s no secret, among radio operators, that radio waves are affected by the state of the earth’s upper atmosphere, and how things are apt to get garbled when there’s a lot of sunspot activity. In 1843, someone named Woolf noticed that sunspot cycles appeared to follow a rhythm of 11.11 years. At the beginning of the cycle, they’re near the poles and get nearer to the sun’s equator as the cycle progresses, and then it’s back to the poles by the time the cycle peters out. But each cycle varies considerably. For example, in 1645 and 1715, there were hardly any sunspots at all.

It’s no secret, among cops and paramedics and hospital emergency wards, that things can get wacky under a full moon. Those full moons in Aquarius particularly so.

Now the sun rotates like the earth does, on its own north/south axis. But since it’s not a solid entity and is composed of plasma gases, a solar day is much different: 37 earth days at the poles as opposed to 26 at the equator. It also has an unusual magnetic field: a north-south dipole and an equatorial quadripole. The quadripole field looks like four bubbles of magnetism spaced at equal intervals around the equator; these bubbles are of alternating polarity. And because the sun’s poles are turning faster than its equator, its magnetic flux lines get wound up into loops, like spaghetti, twisted on a fork. Which apparently causes areas of intense magnetism to build up under the sun’s surface. When they burst to the surface, we see them and call them sunspots. But those sunspots don’t just stop at the surface. They get carried out into space on the solar wind as it courses through a substance called, right now, “black matter”. Which is the main composition of most of the universe. And we only know very little bit about it.

Just like we only know a bit about why astrology works.

In a sense, the stars and planets, etc. are merely bodies of highly condensed matter floating in a sea of thin, attenuated gases. The idea of ‘space’ as ‘vacuum’ doesn’t really apply. And so, just as human beings have an energy field, an ‘aura’, the sun also has an aura. An aura of solar wind. And that solar wind reaches out way past Pluto. That aura radiates throughout the entire electromagnetic spectrum: visible, radio, ultra-violet, x-rays…. and there are probably some rays there we’re not even aware of yet. Those of us who aren’t shamans, at least. Maybe that little hyper-active Indigo child you’ve parented can as well. Maybe, once the Age of Aquarius picks up full steam, all souls born into this strange vale will be tuned into it.

Why do comets have tails that always point away from the sun, no matter how far out from the sun they seem to be? Because of the solar wind.Which is composed of photons.

In 1998, in a coffee shop in Kerrisdale, a hoity-toity neighborhood in Vancouver, I happened to come across a copy of the New York Times that someone left behind, and in it I read an article by a reporter named Malcolm Browne, who was writing about an experiment some scientists in Geneva had done, in which they experimented with twin photons of light that had been separated and placed ten kilometers apart, to see if both would respond to a stimulus applied to just one of them. (A photon is a particle of energy, of radiant heat, that moves at the speed of light and possesses a neutral charge.)

It was, ostensibly, a scientific investigation of the mysterious long-range connections that exist between quantum events, i.e. connections that are created from nothing at all. Connections that, in theory, can travel, instantaneously, from one end of the universe to the other.

In essence, the experiment by Dr Nicholas Gisin of the University of Geneva sent pairs of photons in opposite directions to villages north and south of Geneva, dispatched along fiber-optic lines, and when each photon pair reached the end of their separate lines, they were forced to make random choices among equally possible pathways. Since there was no way for the photon pairs to communicate with each other, ‘classical physics’ -not ‘quantum physics’ – would predict that their independent choices would bear no relationship to each other.

But when their paths were compared, the independent decisions made by the paired photons always matched. Emphasis on the ‘always’.

The idea behind Dr. Gisin’s experiment is not new. Since the seventies physicists have been testing a quantum theory that suggests ‘entangled particles’ (identical particles that share common origins and properties) remain in instantaneous contact with each other no matter how large the gap between them. This is old hat to fans of MichioKaku, and his ‘super-string theory’ about the nature of the universe, and to fans of Michael Talbot, author of THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE, and to anyone who has ever googled the concept of ‘non- locality’ or, as someone named Einstein called it, “spooky action at a distance.”

Dr. Gisin set a dramatic distance record by showing that the link between two entangled particles survives even when they are ten kilometers apart. Past experiments on entangled particles were carried out over distances of a hundred meters or less. In principle, he says, it should make no difference whether the correlation between twin tangled particles occurs when they are separated by a few meters….or by the entire universe.

Malcolm Browne went on to explain that an underlying enigma remains.

One of the weird aspects of quantum mechanics, he writes, is that something can simultaneously exist and not exist; if a particle is capable of moving along several different paths, the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics allows it to travel along all paths and exist in all possible states simultaneously. However, if the particle happens to be measured by some means, its path or state is no longer uncertain. The simple act of measurement instantly forces it into just one path or state. Physicists call this a ‘collapse of the wave function’. The amazing thing is that if just one particle in an entangled pair is measured, the wave function of the particles collapses into a definite state that is the same for both partners, no matter the distance between them. Among several proposed explanations for all this is the ‘many worlds’ hypothesis: the notion that for every possible pathway or state open to a particle, there is a separate universe. But that’s a different ball of wax.

Soon after reading that New York Times article, I came across the Aug/Sept 1998 issue of the Mountain Astrologer and read an interview with Dr. Percy Seymour. Dr. Seymour believes that the sun, moon and planets telegraph their effects to us via magnetic signals. His multi-link theory proposes that the planets raise tides in the gases of the sun, creating sunspots and their particle emissions, which then travel across interplanetary space to strike the earth’s magneto-sphere, ‘ringing it like a bell’. He goes on to say that on days when the geomagnetic index was high, the planetary heredity effects of Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and, to some extent, the moon, were enhanced. “The level and intensity of solar activity waxes and wanes within the eleven year solar sunspot cycle”, he wrote. “My theory proposes that certain planetary alignments affect solar activity…….” Dr. Seymour then cites Jane Blizard’s work for NASA, which showed evidence that heliocentric planetary conjunctions, oppositions and ninety degree alignments give rise to ‘violent solar disturbances’.

Which, conceivably, are then perceived – and encoded – by the neural network of the fetus inside the mother’s womb.

Think of each of our cells having its own radio antenna, composed of photons, protons and electrons, which pick up these signals based upon the frequency that was stamped upon them at birth.

In the December, 1999/ January 2000 issue of NEXUS Magazine, in an article titled, NEO-ASTROLOGY: Statistical Evidence for the Influence of the Planets?, Anthony Craig writes, “If it be supposed that each body cell – a watery sac, ideal for the reception and conduction of electromagnetic frequencies – is receiving the vibrations in the atmosphere, and that the glands are sensitive to frequencies of a definite pitch, then we have an ideal theoretical framework for the mechanics of celestial influence.”

Added to that, we have the lunar daily magnetic variation that is caused by the moon tugging at the layers of plasma, or charged particles, trapped in the earth’s magnetosphere. We know the impact the moon has on the planet’s tides. And, if you will, on female menstrual cycles. Is it merely a coincidence that the percentage of water in a human body matches that of the percentage of water making up the planet earth?

According to Dr. Seymour’s calculations, the solar maximum after the End of the Mayan Calendar would likely correspond with the much-ballyhooed culmination of a succession of square aspects between Uranus and Pluto, in 2015.

There’s a book I’m reading now called COSMOS AND PSYCHE by Richard Tarnas, in which the author goes to great pains, and at great length, to posit his thesis that the proof in why astrology can be gleaned by examining the periods throughout history when the events transpiring on the planet matched up with what was happening in the heavens, Uranus and Pluto conjoined, and the classic interpretation of that powerful aspect. Like the mid-60s and the French Revolution. Or, as he himself puts it, “In all these phenomena involving the synthesis and mutual activation of these two archetypal impulses, we see clear suggestions of the different forms of patterning in correlation with the Uranus -Pluto cycle: a synchronous pattern, in which a single alignment coincides with a multiplicity of archetypal related events in different locations and different levels of activity that occur independently yet in close temporal proximity; and a diachronic pattern, in which a series of cyclical alignments over the course of several centuries coincides with a distinct sequence of significant events that forms a meaningful progression for a specific movement or in a specific area of activity.”

It strikes me that something just might be trying to bonk us on our collective heads, and it’s related to quantum physics and the proof underlying astrology’s dynamic but mysterious mechanism. It seems to me that we’re already sitting on that proof, like some Great Mythic Bird, on the Cosmic Egg. It just needs to be acknowledged. Or hatched.

Until then, keep in mind something that Albert Einstein once said. “The most beautiful experience we have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art, and true science.”

Because, in a sense, that describes astrology in one pithy stroke. As only a true genius could do.

Garrett Coulson

About the author: Garrett Coulson was born in the Big Muddy Badlands west of Mankota, Saskatchewan, where his Aunt Aurora taught him how to catch rattlers and read the stars, using only an ephemeris, a table of houses and a slide rule. She called it Metaphysical Home-schooling, 101. Using that education, Garrett took a look at the zodiac chart for Google’s IPO in 1998, saw that Jupiter Pluto conjunction there, just like the one in Bill Gates’ chart, and bought a thousand shares, and the rest, they say, is history. Now that Garrett’s second Saturn Return has come around, he’s decided to shed the skins he’s previously worn, dishwasher, bartender, waiter, writer, stockbroker, jack of all trades, and become what his Aunt Aurora told him he was born to do, under his previous Saturn Return, i.e. your friendly neighborhood metaphysician, a star-gazer, or, if you will, an astrologer. If he waits for his next Saturn Return, when he’s ninety years old, well, then, that just might be a tad too late. The astrological chart is the map of your soul, he believes. He has studied astrology with Robert Hand and Philip SedgwicK, (Seattle, 1997) solar arc progressions with Noel Tyl (Vancouver, 1998), Evolutionary Astrology with Mark Jones (Reading, Eng. 2000), Free Will Astrology with Rob Breszny (Burning Man, 2001). Garrett is a double Gemini, moon in Pisces. His natal Mercury forms a near-perfect trine to his natal Neptune, which is, as any dime-store astrologer will tell you, a very auspicious aspect for any metaphysician. Garrett Coulson can be contacted at cosmic2307@icloud.com

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Tags: And Why It Works, The World’s Second Oldest Profession