As astrology becomes further institutionalized and accredited, for good reasons such as ethics, but also in a bid for popular validation, I don’t want to forget the poetry of it, the hidden pieces, the dark places. (thread)

Many of us won’t and can’t forget, of course, and a balance of rigour and imagination is the most common way to practice astrology, but there is always a risk of loss when we prioritize technique and empiricism over lived experience and romance.

I want to balance depth of knowledge and rigour of technique with the expansive uncertainty that is exploring the unknown, which necessitates memory and poetry and dream, the irrational and ungraspable.

To stand in the dark, in the unknown, and view the astrological chart from the IC is not to attempt to drag the darkness up to the light, to transmute the shadows into something tangible, but simply to be able to observe, acknowledge, find edges to see how we bump up against it.

We work with the IC in astrology to understand there is a darkness, there is an Other, there is relationship with ancestor, spirit, land, history, where we are eternally safe, where we belong. We are stardust and tides. We are wax and wane and worry and warmth.

Nowhere do we more strongly connect to these facts, I believe, than at the “bottom of the sky,” at our IC, our Imum Coeli. We live with knowledges we may not even know we have, that we’ve perhaps forgotten as we crawl toward the light.

this is an excerpt from the Introduction chapter from the work we're doing over on the patreon, which is available for download upon sign-up until Monday at 1pm ET. links in bio.