Grahas
I was listening to John Robb, BJ Campbell, Patrick Ryan, and Jordan Hall talk about a collective entity they refer to using various names like a swarm, egregore, or autocults.
While listening to the discussion, I kept thinking “Egregore is a funny name for the transits”. In Astrology, the planets are not gods, per say, but they influence the archetypes that can “grab us”. In Ancient India the planets were called “grahas”, meaning grabbers. During certain planetary transits and alignments, the planets would grab the souls that gave in. Its important to remember that Astrology is a language that describes time. Just as we are comfortable with the idea of seasonal allergies and seasonal depression, we can recognize that this is all the ancients were doing with astrology. They were developing algorithms to describe how humans interacted with their environment during certain times of year (or decades as it were…).
There is a nice way to conceptualize astrology that describes the Observer Mind and the Observer. The Observer Mind is the Primary Motion of the sky and carries with it all the stars and planets around the ecliptic of the Earth. This is due to the rotation of the Earth on its axis which forms a day. From our geocentric perspective, however, the planets move counter to this direction in what is referred to as Secondary Motion. This is an optical illusion created by the planetary orbits around the sun. The planets appear to be bright stars and appear first when the sun goes down. The ancients were able to track the ‘bright stars’ that danced across the sky. This made it easy for them to map out how the thought realm reacted during any given time, and during centuries of documented data collection, myths and archetypes were collected and curated.
As human souls, we can lean into our impulses, or we can accept and allow things to be as they are. There is not an objectively right or wrong choice to make either. If we choose to act on the emotion, we have likely allowed the planetary transit to act on us. Which may be something harmless like: “my instinct told me to organize these folders”. So instead of a dichotomous, on/off switch, we have a group that is catching every wave of the transits together, and a lot of that is fueled by various aspects. For instance, Saturn square Uranus has been a huge theme over the last 2–3 years, which can manifest as a battle between freedom vs restriction. Sound familiar? Of course, it can manifest in other ways such as victim mentality vs tyranny in the respective shadow forms.
The question is really, what is causing the humans to make the decisions to be grabbed? That seems to have a lot to do with what we define as success based on the algorithm we’ve developed to participate on an interpersonal level. I think of ideals like: becoming the founder or CEO, having gobs of money, the bigger the house the better. With our desires leading us into a place of victimhood, we can be very easily moved by aggression. I personally believe a lot of this has to do with a deep insecurity about not having all the information but knowing it is out there. Not being able to see the future, but knowing we all inevitably will die.
I believe it would be incredibly helpful for people to know the myths to be able to consider complete archetypes and not just a bad guy versus good guy dynamic. The ancients believed that evil was necessary sometimes, even if just as a catalyst to a new era. The part of astrology I have found to be the most healing aspect in this existential crisis is that it allows us to zoom out.
Originally written in Collective Journaling at The Stoa
