Where do we attend when it’s all happening again? Relational Astrology, Planetary Hours, and Living Cycles

Sometimes I think we do a disservice when we talk about astrology as if it's separate from the rest of our lives. Is "astrology" simply the study of it? Is this what we pick up and put back down?

I talk a lot about planetary cycles. I think and live and feel these cycles every day, for better or worse, even when I don't look at any charts, even when I'm not "doing astrology." Maybe it’s a Saturn thing, but even before my return, I spent a couple years attempting to forget what I knew, and it didn’t work.

I suppose there is a point-of-no-return when you live astrologically.

Even if our memories of the exact orbits and dates and dignities fade, I believe once we live with the planets, acknowledge their presence, relate them to our experiences, we’re never fully the same. I think the planetary cycles are in our bodies, our bones and breath, whether we acknowledge them consciously or not.

While my work falls under the umbrella of queer astrology, I consider what I do to be more specifically articulatable as relational astrology. My practice isn’t just about synastry and composite/ Davison charts, though those are helpful. The connections between charts reveal the ways the moving sky brings us together in moments of impact. I will forever repeat, that transits are collective experiences.

Relational astrology is about connection, conversation, and care. Relational astrology is about seeing a chart as less a snapshot of an individual personality, purpose, and circumstances, and more as a gateway to experience all the ways we are connected to others and their worlds, the human, non-human, more-than-human, to the struggles we all share, to the stories we muddle through and the roving bands of strangers and spirits and places we join forces with along the way.

Planetary Days and Hours

Last Friday, I woke up and lit some sandalwood incense on the Venus altar, the candle already lit from my partner's morning prayers. Venus slowly becoming visible again, my anticipation of spotting her in the western sunset sky is deep. I say out loud, "I can't wait to see you." It's quiet, outside the hum of the sandalwood and the rain. 

I pondered the mood of the Moon, knowing it was waning in Aries in anticipation of the Taurus new moon. The reception with Mars in Cancer, my fallen time lord, is achey. I lie down on the floor and stretch the muscles in my upper chest, breathing deeply. I touch my temples, run my fingers down my neck to the spot under my collarbone. I trace my aching head, the Aries Moon, to my tense neck, the Taurus Sun squared by Saturn in Aquarius, to my tight and heavy chest, Mars in Cancer. 

I ignite my gas stove, heat up the cast iron skillet, a new Mars year adoption. The aches remain. I put on a Miles Davis record, open the window to the sound of light rain, and pick up my phone to text a bff about our weekly Venus day video chat. I won’t look at the chart the entire day, won’t read any horoscopes other than buds’ words shared on twitter. The only thing to do today is drink more water, and find some pleasure and ease. 

Today, Mars’ day, my time lord still fallen, I wake up sick as I’ve been since the Taurus new moon (in my 6th house), a health relapse like I haven’t experienced since last summer. I know the triggers, I see why it happened, and I know it’ll pass, but it’s no less frustrating. The Mars candle already lit on the altar, I give it a glare and light no incense. 

I do my regular release stretches and meditations with more pain and agitation than usual. I make a little less coffee on Mars’ day; it seems to go further. I turn the stove on immediately, before the kitchen gets too hot from the direct sun. Extra garlic, more hot sauce than usual.

I’m back to dietary restriction land, hopefully momentarily, after a long period of successful moderation. While adherence to a restricted diet is a Saturnine endeavour, it’s a Martian experience to be cut off from nourishment and pleasure. Only a few more days of my 8th house Cancer month, during my 12th house Mars year. I let myself feel anger, let the resentment shift away from my body and toward the Western medical systems so scared of death they treat every symptom like a threat rather than a signal.

I check the chart. Mars is rising, on the ascendant degree. The water boils. 

Relational Astrology

Perhaps I've just been "doing astrology" for long enough that it's ingrained in everything. I think, rather, astrology has always been ingrained in everything and I've just opened more to it, let it in, built relationship and allowed myself to be guided by the cycles of the planets and luminaries. 

When I first began my work on the I.C. at the end of 2017, I found myself trying to “elevator pitch” the idea of the book. While my astrology practice was forged in British depth-oriented psychological astrology, and the American currents of evolutionary astrology and revival of ancient astrologies, especially Hellenistic astrology, what I found myself doing in client consultations was not purely any of those things.

In fact, my practice itself was emphatically a remedy to the parts of “my” traditions that were unsatisfactory or could even be harmful when I sat in session in the beautiful, queer, traumatized, young humans who were my clients (and myself). Shifting within the movement of “queer astrology,” I defined my work and research as “relational astrology” as a corrective move to the main currents in so-called "western" astrology, the currents in which my astrologer-self was raised.

Relational astrology is not new; many practitioners and traditions, especially those less complicit in white supremacy cultures, have never lost sight of the fact that the astrological chart shows a multiplicity of worlds, shows the relatedness and embeddedness of all the beauty and horror and magic and sacredness and mundanity and specificity and injustice and hope. Relational astrology is not invention or revelation, but recognition and remembering.

Relational astrology is magic. Relational astrology is an astrology in which magic never left. It’s an astrology of the community kitchen witch for millennia, reading the stars over healing tea crafted with plants grown and served in tandem with their celestial spheres. It’s an astrology of the dirt and sky. Relational astrology sidesteps the argument between objective and subjective interpretations of the chart by calling out the fallacy that the distinction even means anything when one is living in their moment. It’s an astrology from and for those of us who work with people, with plants, with animals and spirits and deity and ancestors and angels. Relational astrology reveals the chart to be no map nor puzzle nor snapshot nor individual personality, but the world itself.

Relational astrology means living astrologically intertwined with the living cycles of the planets, recognizing our intimate connection with all things within the planetary spheres, deepening our capacity to relate, to heal, to listen, to attend, to all the worlds around us. I’ve seen it change my own life. I see it change the lives of clients. Is it everything? No, but it’s something.

Living Cycles

I’m almost through an intensive month of client work. I’ve found myself asking a couple folks experiencing anxiety about transits: what does astrology do for you? Does it help? Does it need to help? Is it enough to just be attuned and connected?

In a discipline and industry with neverending founts of knowledge, is it ever enough? I couldn’t tell you if living astrologically has helped in any discernible way that could be quantified in a late capitalist value system  (which includes “healing”). Perhaps that’s also a point-of-no-return quandary. At the very least, living astrologically has deepened my relationship to, well, everything, and it certainly makes the passing of time more exciting. 

You know I am a fan of historical autobiographical research to find echoes in the collective cycles we are living. I especially want to stress that even more than the repetition of a singular cycle, I want us to witness the differences. The differences are the way to seek any truth. 

That fated moment I sat on my floor, wondering how to pay for medication, remembering someone saying, "Whatever you were doing when you weren't writing your thesis, that's what you should be doing for money" I laughed. Trauma recovery work and astrology. Here we are, five years later.

Cycles thinking is helpful in both astrology and trauma work. We get triggered, we relapse, oh no, it's happening again. To shift it, the move is to acknowledge yes it is happening again but also recognize the ways in which this moment, this time, is different. When we're investigating historical and autobiographical astrological cycles, yes, it's important to see where the repetition happens, where the relatedness lies, but also the ways we work through it, the ways we spot the meaning and the movement by looking to what is different, by looking to where the connections take us.

Relating to the collective cycles of the planets is essential to understanding how our own chart truly fits into it all. Whenever we go through a personal transit, we are moving with the collective. The complexity of the dance upon first glimpse can be overwhelming (ask anyone who started their astrology journey with Cosmos and Psyche). When you get a little further into the forest of your astrological life, though, lost and resigned to wander, the simplicity of it all is truly astonishing, and perhaps that’s the point-of-no-return. 

As the astrological industry and esoteric communities continue to grow, and we each go through personal transits of enlivening and expansion, I hope we (re)commit to the ethical global relational obligations brought to us by these collective cycles. If you’re reading this writing, you’re here with us and I am grateful.

No transit happens in a vacuum. "The personal is the planetary." (I just googled that phrase to see if it could be traced, though I can't remember ever hearing it before, and it seems to exist everywhere in the ether of the spiritual/ecological imagination, fitting.)

Another: "A better end of the world is possible." A client last week recounted this phrase they saw written on a concrete wall. I've been thinking about it since.

“Where do we attend when it’s all happening again? Relational Astrology, Planetary Hours, and Living Cycles”

was originally posted on my Patreon, and revised summer 2022 to include more excerpts from the introduction chapter of ‘The IC: An Astrology of Coming Home'.’

For more of Pallas’ writing, research, and astrology, check out their Patreon.