The Prescription Model
I used to work for a Naturopathic physician at a health food store.
She and her husband also had a talk show on AM radio. They were local celebrities but they didn’t really fit the mold of the community. In fact, they seemed to attract some of the most eccentric customers. Once a guy tried to preach the gospel of numerology to me and another time a woman wanted to talk to me about her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Back in those days, the anti-vaxxers were far left home schooling granola moms. The men were mostly there to accompany their wives and they would often ask me what every supplement was for before telling me they didn’t believe it worked. “It’s snake oil you’re selling here!” There were exceptions but for the most part our customers were weird and I loved them for it.
The demographic for folks shopping at a health food store has changed dramatically since then, especially after the pandemic. More people are adding supplements to their diets, more people know which ones to take, and more people listen to talk shows (we just call them podcasts now). Over the course of a decade and a half, I have watched countless mom and pop shops close down because they were either bought out or they couldn’t make ends meet with the rise in online shopping.
The doctor I worked for ended up selling out to a corporation that also bought the supplements she had formulated. Each of the different items in her supplement line were indicated for a certain body part or ailment, for example: Eye Formula or Kidney Formula. This was meant to make things easier for the customer. Herbs have long been named for certain medicinal uses like “eyebright” comes to mind right off the top as it has been used for- you guessed it- ailments of the eye. The Doctrine of Signatures was another method that humans used to assign meaning to plants. “That one is good for your brain” said man of the walnut.
I really loved my job because it felt like meaningful work. People needed answers and I had them. They were given to me. I thought I was passing along wisdom and sure, it is an incredible database that I have in my brain. The intention was to teach people how to take care of themselves without the need for pharmaceutical intervention, but it just gave them a different kind of detached relationship between their body and the plants.
Week after week the most common question that I was asked was “What do you have for weight loss?” followed very closely by “What do you have to burn fat?” New customers wanted to know where to find the herb that Dr. Oz recommended and that included everything from raspberry ketones to apple cider vinegar. What these people weren’t realizing is that he was giving options. There was no magic pill that would work for everyone. This used to get on my nerves because I wanted to help people that were actually interested in the herbs. These interactions made me cynical about the industry.
Herbs aren’t prescriptions, they are our guides. Our bodies know this, but our logical brain would like for there to be clinical trials, double blind studies, and published papers to ensure that what we take is good for the organ or disease we intend to treat. The thing is, plants that our body needs will enter our lives when our body needs them. I know, I get it. We weren’t raised with the plant people so this seems like bullshit. We shut ourselves into four walls and did everything we could to keep nature out. We didn’t build relationships with the botanical species, we forgot how to make offerings, and we opted to let the ‘experts’ trick us into destroying our planet to harvest healthiness for ourselves.
Nowadays I cringe a little when someone says “I take _________ because its good for __________”. Don’t get me wrong. I am a scientist by degree. I know why experiments are necessary and I know that modern medicine works and that is why we got stuck on this idea of prescriptions. They work but they also generally have side effects. Why do you think that is? Because they throw the body out of balance, they disrupt the status quo and yes even for the better but not without consequences. I’m not writing this to convince anyone to think like me even though it sounds like I am, I just have to write these words down because I feel this deep in my body. We are eating poor diets and then wondering why our bodies don’t work like they used to and its just absurd.
The whole reason I even got to this place in my mind is because of a recent conversation I had with a man that I really admire. I tried to explain to him how my Venus in Taurus is different from his Venus in Aquarius. To my surprise, he did not receive it well at all. He told me that what I was describing to him was different love languages. He then brought up Nature vs. Nurture in an attempt to dispute my Astrology speak, insisting that if those two influences couldn’t even be determinant then someone’s birth place and time could obviously not be either. This is where he misunderstood my intentions.
I was not trying to describe him as he is to himself- I was conveying to him my understanding of a Venus in Aquarius. I was telling him about what I encountered with the archetype and yes I was telling him in the context of how I encounter him. I was describing how it looked to me. I was not dropping facts or the capital-T-Truth. I realized that he thought at that point that I was unable to see from any other perspective when I was actually trying to do just that. I wanted to learn but he got defensive and so I backed off. I even felt compelled to assure him that Astrology is not my only lens but it is the one I use most often. I would even argue that my Venus in Taurus lens, along with my Mars in Cancer lens were the two I was looking through for our lively discussion.
As an Astrologer, I know that I can also see through the lens of a Capricorn rising. Both of my sisters and even a few of my friends have Capricorn on the Ascendent. I like the “I’m not taking any of your shit” attitude apparently. It isn’t how I operate but I appreciate it a lot. I can even see through the lens of Venus in Aquarius because I have a lot of placements there but also because these are just archetypes. They aren’t prescriptions, they are our guides… just like the plants. Everyday I learn something different about Capricorn even though I feel like I know all the keywords.
Now another place where this very same misconception came to mind is reading the post of a fellow Astrologer. She found out that using a different lineage of Astrology, she was no longer the same rising sign as she had learned from her previous teachings. This is one of the most common questions in intermediate Astrology when people learn there are different systems. “Well in Vedic it says I am a Pisces! How can I be both?” There is an entire philosophical discussion to be had here. I used to say you’ll receive the messages that are meant for you no matter what but now I am sensing a different face of the prescription model. It says “here is the right sign for you and these are the positives and negatives and this is what you should work on and here are the journaling prompts and PRESTO there you go, that’ll be $555!”
It isn’t like that at all. I don’t wander the world with Gemini Rising skin on my body. I am not the quintessential Gemini. These zodiacal signs are forms. People don’t look at me and think, “Yep, she’s definitely governed by Mercury”. It’s just a lens. It’s a toolkit. The framework for the type of Astrology I study (Hellenistic) is a complete “theory” like the color wheel. There are rules that seem arbitrary like “The Houses of Venus oppose the Houses of Mars”, the three signs for each element are in a trine position from one anther. It’s elegant and organized but indeed our logical minds don’t know what to do with it. We can’t treat it like some diagnosis but that doesn’t make it any less useful. When someone comes to me for a reading, I am not telling them something about them, I am describing what I know about the archetypes that fall in their chart. The client remembers what is meaningful because they feel it in their body. The words speak to them in different ways than I can even imagine.
I don’t think everyone has to study Astrology just like I never expected everyone to grow their own herb garden but I just notice that the way I relate to these things is informed by my experience of building a relationship with them.
