"What the hell is water?" (Part II)
I ended the previous article on the importance of trusting the evidence of our own eyes and senses.
In other words, trusting the observations that we make about reality.
Making an observation feels objective in theory, yet it is incredibly subjective in practice.
Who is the person making the observation? How do they make sense of the world? What do they expect (or are hoping) to see? What sort of observations are they able to make, given their psychological biases or even limitations in perceptive ability?
And once the observation is made, how is it received by others?
This is not just a philosophical exercise. Making an observation is the very first step of the scientific method. Therefore, the answers to these questions determine whether we manage to make sense of reality, or whether we fail to do so.
Astrology provides a very useful lens for understanding the people making an observation, as well as those receiving it.
Let’s look at a few real-life examples:
Example 1: When hand washing went against the establishment
Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis was a 19th century medical doctor described as the “saviour of mothers”. He noticed a pattern: the patients of doctors who were moving from performing autopsies to delivering babies died at much higher rates. He developed a hypothesis and tested it, making doctors in the clinic wash their hands.
Maternal mortality dropped from 16% to 2% within months.
In other words, he applied the scientific method and got very encouraging results. But when he shared his findings with the medical community, he was met with skepticism and ridicule. Germ theory had not yet been established, and some doctors were offended at the idea of washing their hands. Human ego sadly doesn’t take a break for science.
His observations were correct, he approached the matter scientifically, yet his findings were only accepted in the mainstream after his death. (source 1, source 2)
According to Astrodienst, Semmelweis was a Cancer Sun (mother archetype association) ruled by a Gemini Moon potentially conjunct a Gemini Mercury (could sniff a pattern immediately!). However with Saturn-Pluto conjunction in Pisces (power dynamics in / the shadow of the medical establishment) likely squaring both these placements, his observations ruffled feathers…
Example 2: When theory was more valued than the evidence of one’s own eyes
Parapsychology is a classic, more contemporary example. Despite mounting evidence and refined scientific methodologies for psi phenomena, skeptical dogma has always cast a shadow over the field. A notable quote:
“I cannot believe it. Neither the testimony of all the Fellows of the Royal Society, nor even the evidence of my own senses would lead me to believe in the transmission of thought from one person to another independently of the recognised channels of sensation. It is clearly impossible” (quote attributed to Hermann von Helmholtz, source)
It makes sense he’d have been a more conservative guy when we look for instance at his Virgo Sun (pragmatic, skeptical) trine Jupiter in Taurus (a fixed belief system, oriented towards the concrete). Ironically, Taurus is all about sensory perception, but because his Jupiter also conjuncts Saturn in Aries, Helmholtz’s trust in first-person perspective (Aries) was limited (while simultaneously strengthening his faith in the philosophy of scientific materialism). His Leo Mercury also comes through in the vivid and somewhat dramatic imagery used.
Example 3 – Dr Jane Goodall, primatologist and anthropologist
Her Sun-Mars conjunction in Aries screams pioneering powerhouse!
Dr Jane Goodall challenged longstanding dogma of humans being seen as fundamentally different from other animals. Her willingness to do things differently revolutionised our understanding of both chimpanzee behaviour and what it means to be human.
In typical Aries fashion, her career was characterised by ‘firsts’, learning on the job, and lightning speed. She was initially recruited to work with chimpanzees precisely because she had no previous experience. She then used this experience to pursue her PhD – without holding a Bachelor degree! – and continued to bring unusual new perspectives to her field:
“The more I got to know about the chimps and the more I watched mothers raising their children. I saw their emotional lives. I saw grief, when a mother died, from her child or the other way around. I saw males competing for dominance, showing aggression and anger, looking just like some human male politicians, by the way. And I saw, as I’ve said, a sort of primitive war but also compassion and true altruism as when an unrelated male adopts a little motherless orphan. And yet when I got to Cambridge University (…) I was very nervous and I was told I’d done everything wrong. I shouldn’t have named the chimpanzees. They should have had numbers. I couldn’t talk about them having a personality, a mind, or emotions because those were unique to us.” (source)
With Sagittarius Moon on her ascendant, the lens she looked through at reality was bound to catch the presence of emotions, even where consensus insisted there were none.
The practices she introduced are the way things are now done.
Example 4 – Dr Barbara McClintock, cytogeneticist
Sun-Ceres conjunction in Gemini, her sense of self entangled with the very Goddess of grain, Dr Barbara McClintock quite fittingly worked with maize.
She was a Nobel prize-winning cytogeneticist whose findings on genetic transposition were way ahead of her time (Jupiter in Aquarius).
The scientific community rejected her findings because they didn’t fit consensus theory at the time.
She announced her findings in 1951 (“They thought I was crazy, absolutely mad.”). Her work was ignored for over a decade. Only in 1983, 32 years later, did she receive the Nobel prize for her findings.
Here is how McClintock felt when she was studying the chromosomes in a mold called Neurospora:
“I found that the more I worked with them the bigger and bigger [they] got, and when I was really working with them I wasn’t outside, I was down there. I was part of the system. I was right down there with them, and everything got big. I even was able to see the internal parts of the chromosomes – actually everything was there. It surprised me because I actually felt as if I were right down there and these were my friends.” (source)
Dr McClintock literally had visions of how the chromosomes looked like. She felt as if she was actually amongst them. She related to them as friends. With a Mercury-Neptune conjunction in Cancer trine Scorpio Moon, she was someone profoundly intuitive. This was simply the way that she naturally thought, and it was indeed biology-oriented (Cancer) but with a twist that went against the dogma of making observations purely with detachment and objectivity.
What are YOUR observations?
What observations are you uniquely equipped to make?
When we prioritise going with group consensus above our own knowing, above the things we uniquely understand about reality because of our unique makeup and experiences, we fail to notice things that are actually really there.
Things that are true about the world, that we have the privilege to spot.
There are many ways of knowing, there are many ways of contributing, and there are many ways of living one’s vocation.
The question is, what happens when they don’t fit within the parameters of the society we live in? Within the parameters of how we’ve been brought up? Within the parameters of what is seen as possible and impossible?
The pressure to go with group consensus above our own knowing is immense.
Yet so is the calling within.
How’s the water you’re currently swimming in?
Maybe you’re not even a sea animal?
For some vocations, stepping out of current paradigms is a must.
But then, where do we land? What do we build on?
In the next article, I’ll write about the things that support us when creating our own paradigms, so our vocations have a place to land and take root.
🌱
If something in this resonated, a vocational astrology reading might be your next step.
Many of us are feeling the call to bring a new type of contribution to the world, one that feels truer to who we are, yet may look very different to what we’ve done before, or what we’ve been taught is ‘sensible’, ‘allowed’ or ‘worthwhile’.
Through my vocational astrology readings, I can help amplify the volume of that call so that you can hear it clearly and act on it with confidence.
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Until next time,
Cristina