Is
Where I Am, Who I Am?[1]
1. Charts, changes, and
changed charts
Even for those of us (like me) who don’t strictly ‘believe in’ it,
astrology can be a helpful source of liberating alternative suggestions –
possibilities of getting beyond the limiting recursiveness of rationality. ‘Putting
on a different pair of glasses,’ as the Dutch idiom puts it. And as the
American astrologer Marc Edmund Jones liked to say, sometimes we can learn a
lot from make-believe.
One of the less
well-known types of horoscope is the so-called ‘relocation chart.’ This, like
our birth horoscope, is calculated for the exact day and time of our birth, but
unlike the birth chart, it is geographically anchored not in our birthplace but
wherever we want the relocation to refer to. It could be the place where we are
now living, a place where we are considering living in the future, or even the
place where we will attend an important meeting next week. The idea is that
such a chart shows how our inalienable (and unvarying) ‘potential,’ given a new
focus in a new setting, may gain a different, perhaps a more favorable ‘manifestation’
or ‘actuality.’[2] We can
never re-stage our birthday, nor fundamentally change the physical body that we
received as of then – what Wallace Stevens once called ‘the unalterable necessity
of being this unalterable animal.’[3]
But a change of environment does amount to a new ‘body’ of circumstances, a new
em-bodi-ment of the interactive energies that we bring with us. Call it if you
will a ‘virtual’ body.
When I turned sixty –
attained, in other words, what the Chinese call the da shou 大壽or Great Longevity – I happened to be not in my country of birth
which is the USA, nor in my country of residence which is Holland, but in my
dream country which is Taiwan. Musing about the roles played by these various ‘locations’
in my life so far, I sat down and calculated the relevant relocation charts.
The results were amazing.
Even the manner of
calculation betrayed me as a Relocator. Unlike American astrologers, I
calculate the ‘house’ boundaries by the Ascendant Parallel Circle method, and
figure the place of the planets by their so-called Actual Positions (werkelijke plaats), as advocated by a
specifically Dutch wing of astrology called the ‘Ram School.’ Theo Ram
(1884-1961), whose book Psychologische
Astrologie came out in the 1930s and as far as I know has never been
translated, is one of the great theorists of 20th-century astrology.
One of the many reasons why I am thankful to have learned Dutch is that otherwise
I could never have read Ram, or some relevant works of his friends A. E.
Thierens (1875-1941) and Leo Knegt (1882-1957). The studies and discussions of
these three resulted in a type of horoscopy that must seem, to practitioners of
more traditional systems, a heady brew indeed. These Dutch pioneers, and their
latter-day followers, not only routinely work with planets that have ‘not yet’
been discovered by astronomers; you can even download an ephemeris giving the
zodiacal positions of these ‘hypothetical’ planets![4]
And even the positions of the known planets are not determined in the usual
way, which is simply to take the zodiacal longitude as the position. Rather,
the ‘actual position’ of each planet is calculated in a complex and
time-consuming way (but here again, software can be downloaded) which relates
the planetary positions to the individual’s horoscope frame, so that in
contrast to the traditional method, not all persons born at the same moment
have the same planetary positions. For example, in my own birth horoscope, by
traditional reckoning the planet Venus is in Scorpio, but by the Ram School Wisconsin
but in Holland
Supposedly our ‘radix’
(i.e., birth chart) is a fixed, unchanging picture of our ‘potential’ (Sun),
our ‘being’ or ‘essence’ (Moon), and our ‘actuality’ or ‘manifestation’ (the Ascendant,
i.e. the rising sign at the time of birth, which represents the body as the
visible focus of our life). Yet the fixity seems difficult to maintain in
practice. In interpreting one and the same horoscope, Ram uses both the
recognized and the ‘hypothetical’ (what the opponents of this school would call
‘imaginary’) planets. Knegt, whose fanatical mathematical experiments and
theorizings – Ram called him ‘the calculator’ – led to the notion of the
all-important Actual Positions, ironically enough was never quite satisfied as
to what his own Ascendant was, oscillating between the two very different signs
Sagittarius and Capricorn.
Far be it from me to
assert that a relocation chart, being essentially a ‘birth chart’ for a birth
that never actually happened, should have the same status as a radix. Still, I
do believe these charts can shed a surprising and legitimate alternative light.
Undoubtedly I have an
inborn tendency to take just such an attitude. You can see it in my radix. At
the time of my birth in America
2. The Netherlands
From the moment I arrived in The Netherlands in the fall of 1968, I
was in a whole new ‘chart.’ The biggest obvious difference was that the Moon
was now strongly ‘conjunct,’ i.e. together with, the Ascendant. My psyche or
soul or ‘being’ was now right alongside my physical body in its interactions
with the outer world. The Sun (vitality, spirit) was in aspect with the Moon,
as were the planets of thinking and doing: Mercury and Mars. In short: this was
a favorable time-and-space setting in which I could undertake things.
But let’s be clear:
much of my ‘undertaking’ remained more a private experience than a public
reality. As I took up graduate study, and later teaching, at Leiden University
In other respects as
well, my career as a teacher in Leiden confirmed the words that Ram had written
about me eleven years before I was born: ‘Not quite suited to being a
professor, as concrete things do not really interest...’ In itself, it helped
me that in my Leiden relocation chart both Venus
(sense for art) and Neptune (mysticism and the
fantastic) were in the sixth, the House of Analysis, so that Chinese poetry and
philosophy were natural subjects for me to research. But I could never get
excited about the newest book about just how many peasants had died in the
so-manieth rebellion during such-and-such dynasty. To me such things were
bookish details that were but marginal to the ‘essence.’
Besides, in the
relocation chart my House of Analysis was below the Horizon, remaining mostly
invisible. The results of my research seldom reached the Mid-Heaven or Medium
Coeli, the top of the chart as drawn on the page, which represents the socially
most prominent and visible aspect of each ‘native.’ What I published or gave
out during my classes was never the full barrel but at most something on the
order of a shot glass. (In my own defense, I might add that in those days in Holland
There was no reason for
me to be surprised. After all, Saturn, ruler of formal hierarchies and Lord of
my House of Fame, was trapped in a backwater of my Leiden
3. ‘Het Eylant Formosa
In Leiden Taiwan Taiwan Holland
At the same time, I again
took up Tai Chi, the slow and seemingly effortless traditional Chinese
exercises that I had first learned thirty years previously from the legendary
Phoa Yan Tiong in Amsterdam Taiwan Taiwan
But here again, I could
not long succeed in keeping the results for myself. Via my student Alvin Dahn,
whose representative planet was strongly in aspect with my Mid-Heaven, I came
into contact with the television hostess Wenyuan ‘Dodo’ Lee, whose cultural
programs were avidly viewed not only in Taiwan
In these and other
ways, in my Taiwan
But so...has it all
been growth, all advancement? Has it all fitted together to form a unity in
which past and present contribute to each other? Sitting in the ‘actuality’ of
a recording studio with Dodo Lee, talking about my experiences with Tai Chi...would
I need to bring something of my American ‘potential’ and my Dutch ‘being’ into
our conversation? Wear an American baseball cap and occasionally lapse into
Dutch idiom while we are on the Taiwanese air? Of course not. There is no need to repeat past happiness in the
present. It remains where it always was.
And now, looking back on my three ‘actualities,’
my three births or three lives so far – should I try to evaluate, to compare?
Should I wonder which of the three ‘charts’ was the best, the most fitting, the
most truly ‘mine’? Impossible. How to judge, how to know what a life is about?
Maybe the hours, the days that seem to us less important are exactly those in
which we are most irreplaceable to someone else.
In the self-made prayer
that I say on getting up each morning (and yes, I do this in American English),
one of the first phrases is: ‘I thank Thee for this day of my life, and for all
the days of my life.’ Not: thanks, now let’s see here, for two percent of my
life; the other ninety-eight percent that was not consciously ecstatic is well
forgotten. And not: tonight, after I’ve seen how this coming day turned out, I’ll
tell Thee whether I think it was worth being thankful for. No, it’s ‘for all
the days of my life’ or it’s nothing. Thankful is thankful.
--Lloyd Haft
[1] This is a revised adaptation of an article
originally published in Dutch: ‘Welke verjaardag noem ik de mijne?’ Tirade 421
(2007 no. 5, dec. 2007), pp. 48-53.
[2] I am using ‘potential/being or essence/actuality or manifestation’
to translate the recurrent Dutch trio ‘aanleg/wezen/werkzaamheid,’ which presumably
has its origin somewhere in Schelling’s or Hegel’s philosophy and subsequently
came down through writers like Ram and Thierens who were much influenced by
Theosophy.
[3] From his poem Esthétique du
Mal, section 13.
[4] See the website http://www.wva-astrologie.nl/,
under ‘publicaties.’
[5] In astrology, the sun and moon are both called ‘planets.’
