Applying the Hermetic Principles to Astrology and Life.

It was my feelings of inadequacy and being inherently unlovable that led me to embark on my spiritual journey early on. This sense of feeling imperfect and broken sent me searching for a way to be healed or fixed. I was feeling separate and disconnected, living in my ego/ my pain body and always finding fault in myself. I was not connected to spirit where the true perfection is. In my search to fix and heal myself through many different modalities I came across astrology and immersed myself in that for more than a decade.

“As above, so below; as below, so above. As within, so without; as without, so within”, this is the Principle of correspondence, the second of the Hermetic Principles. The Hermetic principles are ancient spiritual and mystical teachings that originated from the writings of Hermes Trismegistus, who was considered a wise sage and known in Egyptian mythology as the God Thoth, the deity of wisdom and knowledge, and Hermes in Greek mythology. The Principle of Correspondence implies the outer world is a mirror of our inner world and vice versa. Thus the birth chart which is basically a map of where all the planets were in the zodiac at the time of your birth is a map of your psyche, your inner world. Interestingly even Carl Jung and Freud studied astrology based on this understanding. For me, I loved how you could see it all in the birth chart; there were so many levels and layers to it. The archetypal energies as represented by the planets could signify past life issues or talents carried forward, childhood and adult life issues/ talents/occurrences, to how you perceived your mother and father which are also symbolic of the feminine and the masculine energies in the chart and how they flow in your psyche. The Principle of gender, another Hermetic principle; “Gender is in everything; everything has its masculine and feminine principles”. The ‘houses’ or segments in the chart represent all the different areas of your life where the planetary energies can play out, again having many layers and symbolic meanings.

I looked to Astrology ‘to get to know myself better’ and it felt comforting being able to use this medium that was outside of myself to project my psyche onto. It led me to delve deeper within and look at what I was perhaps projecting onto others and disowning in myself, but in time it also gave me a rationale or justification as to why I was the way I was. For example, Oh that’s my Uranus T-square that makes me feel restless and unable to commit!  I find it really difficult to communicate and articulate what I want to say because of my Saturn in Gemini and retrograde Mercury so it’s best I don’t speak up, and so on. In doing that however, I was giving my power away, it was reinforcing negative beliefs I had about myself and keeping me focused on my imperfections. The first Hermetic principle is the Law of Mentalism. ‘All is of the one mind, all is of the mind”. We are one with the mind of God, and everything in manifestation is actually a creation of mind, it had to begin as a thought first. We are constantly creating our reality with our thoughts (whether they are conscious or not). In addition, everything we perceive in our reality is filtered through our beliefs and hence our expectations. I was attracting exactly those outcomes because of those beliefs and expectations. This can also be explained by another of the Hermetic Laws: The Principle of Cause and Effect, which states “there is a cause for every effect” and an “effect for every cause”. Through our expectations and hence where we focus our thoughts (cause) we put it to the universe to bring more of that into our life (effect).  The third Hermetic Principle is Vibration. ”Nothing rests; everything is in motion, and everything vibrates”.  This can be applied to thoughts, they each have a frequency that draws to it more of the same frequency. No thought is neutral. Change your mental state and you change your vibration.

So if thoughts create our reality, and it is possible to change our thoughts, then rather than thinking that our astrology chart is set in stone, that it describes these traits or issues that we are stuck with, perhaps we could interpret the chart as showing us the beliefs we came into this incarnation with. The soul being eternal brings us through many lifetimes, we incarnate into this life having had various past life experiences and perhaps let’s face it trauma, which is still etched into our subtle anatomy, holding a vibration and creating beliefs in this lifetime. In addition, we are born into the beliefs inherent in our culture and family that also influence us. Maybe even it was those past life experiences and beliefs that led us to choose our family and the culture we were born into in order to work through them.

So I propose rather than looking at the chart as an explanation of why we are the way we are, perhaps we could use it as a tool to indicate the limiting beliefs that are holding us back from living our highest potential, to explore where we are still keeping ourselves limited and small. And, when we have transits to our birth chart we could see these as highlighting those limiting beliefs that are ready to surface and be worked with at that time, helping us find a rhythm and flow to our awakening. We can then question their reality and truth, reflect on what there is to gain from this belief? Is it an excuse not to step into my power, to play it safe? And to ponder who would I be without this limiting belief?

By mastering our thoughts, our mind, we can be the cause, the creator rather than the effect. And because the Universe is mental and governed by the Law of Correspondence, changing our thoughts and hence our vibration influences the rest of the Universe as well.