She Read Me Like a Book
Yesterday I had my first natal chart reading after a year and a half of obsessively watching transits interact with my personal planets.
I’ve been considering having my chart deciphered by someone else for several months. I just needed to be sure they were within my price range while also having enough experience for me to feel like it was worth it. So one day, while I was scrolling through instagram, I saw Mikhaila Peterson had posted something about astrology and she tagged the astrologer Maria Kuhl. Maria frequently posted beautiful graphics, some of which she had digitally drawn out herself, others were images that she used to explain the archetypes with the assistance of visual aid.
I finally committed when she began explaining that Pluto was one of the most significant placements she would consider in a chart reading. There is a group of astrologers that consider themselves to be “evolutionary astrologers” because they make an attempt to understand the purpose for which this soul entered this existence. They incorporate a lot of space objects, including asteroids and planets that were discovered more recently. Their chart interpretations go beyond the ancient teachings so certain purists will say they are just making stuff up. But I see the value in evolving our I (eye/the globe) to match that which we can see.
Pluto ain’t a planet and Pluto don’t matter.
Since the ancients could not observe Pluto, they had no way to document any events that took place during the significant transits. That is to say, traditional Hellenistic astrologers do not incorporate Pluto or any of the outer planets (namely: Uranus and Neptune), because there is no data in the form of ancient clay tablets. There’s a lot to unpack here, but I’ll just say transit Pluto is very activated in my chart right now as it is conjunct my natal north node. So I felt like Maria was the prime candidate for my first reading. Plus, my natal Pluto is also in the house of day-to-day habits (6th house) so it seems especially relevant for me.
A lot of astrology is story telling and the ability to do that. It sounds flippant and maybe even like woo woo to some, but the truth is: we all respond to stories and often times we internalize them. Archetypes are an excellent tool to use because they tell us how a plot could play out if we embody a certain character model. I especially loved Maria’s interpretation of the ego as this emotional body that is formed after birth which is a collection of everything we feel, see, and experience. This emotional body is what we refer to when we speak of “I”. Pluto is representative of our best and worst experiences. This is also true for the collective soul. Maria describes the soul as a collection of I’s; it does not die when we do, but rather dissolves back into the rest of the I’s.
If you want to take this literally, we all have an impact on one another’s lives, even if we are just talking to the gas station attendant, something changed. Think about the impact that someone’s death has on us. How did you feel about Robin Williams dying? Did you also crumble when you heard about the stoicism of Chadwick Boseman? Knowing people like them existed has an impact on the collective soul. We cherish certain individual existences and despise others. These human lives have become archetypes that contribute to the very old collective soul. The soul stretches beyond every life and even beyond our concept of time.
Most of my chart is connected to collective planetary nodes. According to Maria this plays out as my personal life being intimately connected to the collective soul. When big collective things happen, I am affected by it or I have an affect on the collective. The last couple of years, Pluto has been moving very slowly over my natal placement of the north node of the moon. That means that the section of the sky that Pluto is inhabiting from our geocentric perspective appears to line up with an imaginary spot in the sky that is the average of my solar and lunar orbits… or something like that. So yeah its fucking weird and completely irrelevant if you don’t believe in that sort of thing, but humor me and suspend your disbelief.
I is on a mission to save the soul. No, you read that right… I is on a mission to save the soul; that is to say: my ego or the emotional body that I have created in this lifetime (and lifetimes before) is determined to be a leader. But I is also looking for pleasure in this existence because I has experienced lifetimes of despair and failure. I felt like crying when Maria assured me that things had been difficult in past lives. Whether or not you believe in past lives, they can also be the lives of parents and grandparents. My folks had it hard: my mom had polio and tuberculosis all before turning two and my dad’s adoption story alone is enough to make you wonder how he kept his sanity.
I has a tendency to self-persecute or to find persecution in life (i.e abusive partners). But I also has developed skills that may not have ever existed due to the accumulation of tribulations. I is powerful. Just like persephone holds the key to all kinds of power even though she was raptured, I was dragged through the underworld on this ego’s journey. No one is to blame, for those are the stars and planets that I chose while I was still one part of the collective soul. Even though I does not remember all that has happened, it is still a part of who I is. All of this experience of I joins with the rest of the collective soul, like one bird to the flock.
By the end of the reading, Maria gave me several archetypes to research that fit my chart. I is a Virgo and Scorpio soul that can be best understood through the stories of Persephone and Prometheus. The key here is that Chiron saves prometheus. Another part of her assessment was archetypes that could highlight the path to my north node or soul’s evolution, such as focusing on Sagittarian skills and interests like horses, higher education, and foreign travel. Overall, I highly recommend Maria as an evolutionary astrologer and I is looking forward to speaking with her again.
Originally written in Collective Journaling at The Stoa
