Astrology, Karma & Transformation

Many people first look seriously at their birth chart during a bad patch. The job has become impossible, a relationship has reached its end, or, for no reason they can name, things that used to go well have suddenly all lost their savour. When they look up their transits, what they mostly find is a line like “Saturn opposite Mercury, prone to depression”, followed by “it will pass once the planet moves on.” Such lines say what will happen, but not what this period is for in this person's life. In Astrology, Karma & Transformation, Stephen Arroyo sets out to answer exactly that second question: what is the purpose of a time that looks so hard?

The book first appeared in 1978, with a second edition in 1992. Arroyo holds a master's degree in psychology and worked as a counsellor, and the material in the book comes mainly from his own experience and his consultations. Its chapters take up Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, the aspects in the natal chart, secondary progressions, transits, the Ascendant and Midheaven, and, in the last chapter, how an astrologer should talk with a client. Behind all of them lies one view: applied to a person, astrology mainly describes how he experiences the changes in his life from the inside, and outer events will not always line up with it. So whenever Arroyo reads a planet or a transit, he first asks what this person feels and learns during that stretch.

He uses himself as an example. Many years ago, transiting Saturn opposed his natal Mercury. For that month he felt as though a teacher who knew exactly what he needed to learn was instructing him methodically, and the pressure was so great his head felt ready to burst. Saturn always pushes a person to make things concrete, so he wrote down what came to him, point by point. By the time the transit had passed he had several pages of notes, and in every confused period afterwards he took them out and read them again. Many books predict depression when transiting Saturn touches Mercury; for him, that month was a time of deep insight. Arroyo uses the episode to show that during a major Saturn transit, a person willing to open up can learn very concrete lessons and see clearly how he is living this part of his life.

He himself began studying astrology during a time of great upheaval. Transiting Saturn was conjunct his natal Ascendant, transiting Neptune was in aspect to his natal Venus, and transiting Pluto and Uranus were both striking his natal Uranus in so-called difficult aspects. Astrology was therefore both his profession and a tool for working on himself. He says plainly in the introduction that anyone who wants only predictive formulas and simple character analysis has no need to read this book. It is written for people who are still asking why: why someone is born with these aspects, and what this hard stretch in front of them is for.

Before he studied astrology, Arroyo had already read Jung in depth. Once he began reading astrology books, he was soon disappointed by most of them. One kind dealt only in events, predictions and surface personality; the other, so-called esoteric astrology, was full of vague generalizations and moralizing, and the latter in particular skirted the actual meaning of each astrological factor. Later he discovered Dane Rudhyar, studied Jung for many more years, and gradually arrived at his own way of reading.

The first thing he set out to change was a habit of British and American astrology books from the early twentieth century. Those books sorted every factor into easy and difficult, and the easy counted as good, the difficult as bad. Arroyo found this far too narrow, because life is meant to pass through highs and lows, light and dark, and it is often the very thing that was hardest at the time that gives a person understanding for many years afterward. So this book does not speak of good and bad aspects. Squares, oppositions and the like are called challenging aspects; they bring inner tension that pushes a person to do something. Sextiles, trines and the like are called flowing aspects, and correspond to talents a person can use ready-made.

Nor does he approve of swinging to the other extreme. After Rudhyar and Marc Edmund Jones introduced subtler, more psychological views, many people, in correcting the faults of the old books, wrapped the hard aspects in fine words, as though they never pointed to real weaknesses of character. Arroyo's answer to this is brief:

It seems to me that it is time to be realistic about astrology

Being realistic about astrology, he goes on, means being realistic about ourselves and our lives, because life is full of difficulty. If a birth chart is to map a person's full potential, the difficulties have to be drawn on it too.

The same goes for Saturn. Earlier books mostly called it a malefic, and only in the last decade or two had people begun to say more about its role in growth. Arroyo valued Grant Lewi's pioneering use of the Saturn cycle to look at career, but felt that Lewi used only that one angle, calling Saturn's passage through the first to third houses a “period of obscurity” and treating it merely as preparation for ambitions realized later. For vocational guidance that is enough; for helping someone see his own life clearly, it is not. A kind of counselling that always offers “things will get better” as the only good news, Arroyo says, in effect has people fix their eyes on a fantasy instead of on present facts and feelings, which is much what a fortune-teller does.

Some astrology books lead readers to think that from the Sun and Moon you can deduce whether the parents got along, whether they divorced, whether one of them died early. Arroyo found it was not so easy to deduce, and an occasional lucky guess proves nothing, since there is no need to guess what a single question to the person would reveal. He states the point very clearly:

the birth-chart primarily shows our experience, not necessarily the "objective" facts of the situation.

He saw many people whose parents quarrelled constantly and finally divorced, yet whose own charts had the Sun trine the Moon, with no sign of trouble at home. He also saw people with the Sun square the Moon whose parents lived in harmony for forty years. Arroyo reasons that what the latter experience is that father and mother stand for two conflicting ways of meeting the world, and so they have difficulties of their own in dealing with their actual parents. If you have never been able to say where the awkwardness between you and your parents comes from, this kind of reading is closer to your experience than a bare “disrupted family life”.

When someone came to him at their most chaotic, he did not rush to predict the worst. One client found him close to breaking point, his head full of dark imaginings about his lover. A look at the transits showed transiting Pluto squaring his natal Venus at that very time. Arroyo told him that Pluto transits clear out old ideas and habits, and since the square was to Venus, what was surfacing were all his fears, ideals and expectations about love. The man breathed a sigh of relief. Later Pluto turned retrograde and returned to the square, and the same feelings came again, much lighter; only after the third square passed was this long emotional transformation complete. He had come to see his relationship with his girlfriend clearly and decided not to marry for the time being, and his views on love, marriage, money and beauty had all changed. Some say Pluto transits always bring separation. Arroyo says this man did separate, from the old patterns that had been holding him back, and he and his girlfriend actually grew closer.

When transiting Saturn enters a house, people often feel it already when it is still about 6 degrees from the cusp. The difficulties are most obvious in roughly the first year, and so is the urge to do something about that house's affairs. After that, most people have been forced to learn a more realistic way of coping, and the rest of the lesson goes more easily. As Saturn nears the end of the house, some event often gathers up the efforts of the previous two or three years, and very often no other transit or progression can be found to match it besides Saturn leaving the house. Someone who knows this during the heaviest year knows the pressure will not stay this heavy forever.

Relationships are the same. Traditional readings of transiting Saturn through the seventh house easily make people fear divorce, but in Arroyo's experience divorces are no more frequent then than when Jupiter passes through the seventh. This is a time for making decisions, making commitments or recommitting, when a person can see the partner as a separate individual, different from oneself. People often grow a little cooler at such times and step back, and the partner wonders why you have changed. Since stepping back is only a way of seeing the relationship clearly, explain this to the other person, and they will not imagine something worse.

Anyone nearing thirty who reads the pages on the Saturn return will probably recognize themselves. Arroyo says that at the first Saturn return a person feels two things at once. One is limitation: the possibilities are no longer endless, the experiments of youth have been made, and from here on one has to play out one's role in a larger drama. The other is an inner freedom; quoting Grant Lewi, he says that after this transit many old inner constraints fall away. How hard the return is depends on how the previous twenty-nine years were lived and whether one's own nature was suppressed, and that cannot be deduced from the natal chart alone.

The book has twelve chapters. Chapter 1 is about how people face their experiences and take responsibility for them; Chapter 7 is about how several challenging aspects between two people's charts become the greatest lessons of a relationship; Chapter 11 draws on a set of early records to argue that human will always matters more than planetary influence.

Chapter 2: Transformation

In this chapter Arroyo lays down the premise of the whole book: applied to a person, astrology always deals with transformation; it is a language for describing experience. Suppose someone falls in love while transiting Saturn squares the natal Sun. From that configuration alone, few astrologers could deduce that the person had begun a new romance, but someone who understands Saturn transits can say what the experience means to him, what he will feel in it, and roughly how long its most intense phase will last. So a consultation should be a conversation between two people: the astrologer says half, and for the other half has to listen.

He also objects to a familiar piece of reassurance: “Well, don't worry too much about it. As soon as this planet passes into the next sign, everything will be OK again.” The difficulty showing in the chart is a signal to build a better relationship with the force the planet stands for. Left unaddressed now, it will come back later in another form.

Chapter 3: Keys to Transformation: Part I Uranus & Neptune

The outer planets are often said to concern only a generation or an era. Arroyo says that an astrologer who counsels needs to know what they look like when they land on an individual. Uranus brings sudden change, which is not always destructive; it shows up as destruction only when it meets resistance. When a Uranus transit arrives, people often feel restless and want nothing but change and freedom, and many feel the urge to escape their present situation. If that situation is basically healthy and still flexible, the more constructive course is sometimes to try bold changes within the existing marriage or job. The self-knowledge gained that way is often far deeper than what comes from abandoning the old and rushing at the new. At other times, though, a complete change really is needed.

Neptune is the urge to lose oneself in another state of being and escape every limit. The key to living with it is to stop looking outward for a perfect job or an ideal marriage, return to oneself, and live out the ideal through one's own creativity and commitment. He cautions that without first coming to terms with the reality Saturn represents, one cannot hold the force of the outer planets:

How can we appreciate the value of boundlessness if we have not established a life pattern within definite boundaries?

So the inspiration and ideals Neptune brings have to be tried and carried out in daily life before they can truly be said to have landed.

Chapter 4: Keys to Transformation: Part II Pluto

Arroyo admits that he has never seen a complete account of Pluto's meaning for individual psychology that satisfies him, and this chapter is his own exploration. He explains Pluto through a germinating seed: the seed's hard outer form is split open when the force inside begins to stir, and the broken seed becomes food for the new shoot. Pluto is both the old form that must be removed and the force that bursts it.

A Pluto transit can hardly be seen clearly while it is happening. When the transit is most exact, a person has no distance at all from what is going on and feels only that the rug has been pulled from under him; sometimes, he says, it takes ten years before someone fully understands what was happening in the depths at the time. The house of natal Pluto is where the old self is still very active and where psychic energy is most concentrated, and it easily turns into compulsion and obsession. Someone with Pluto in the fifth house, for example, must learn to use that great strength to do something special, not merely to make others see that he is special.

Chapter 5: Saturn: Its Nature & Cycles

On natal Saturn, Arroyo says that when Saturn works negatively, it comes down in the end to fear, so Saturn's tense aspects are an opportunity to face and master a specific fear. People with Saturn conjunct, square or opposite Mercury, for instance, are often afraid of being seen as stupid, slow or inarticulate. What he sees more often is that such people work all the harder at acquiring concrete skills and knowledge, and usually succeed; the difficulty lies in overdoing it and becoming opinionated.

On transits, he sees Saturn as a very weighty teacher. Roughly every seven years transiting Saturn forms a conjunction, square or opposition to natal Saturn, and those years almost always require an adjustment in one's attitude to responsibility, sometimes along with a change of lifestyle and career. The house Saturn is passing through is the area a person is asked to take seriously in those years. He saw one habitually disorganized, inefficient man suddenly become orderly when Saturn passed through his sixth house, so that even he was surprised at how much he had been getting done.

Chapter 6: Aspects of Transformation in the Natal Chart

In this chapter Arroyo sets down the rule for reading aspects that he likes best: the sign a planet is in shows how it wants to express itself and what it needs, while the aspects show whether that energy actually flows easily and how much effort it takes. An aspect does not tell you whether a person can accomplish something, only how much effort it will relatively take.

By this rule, trines are not all good. He says Neptune trines often appear in the charts of people who escape reality, and some trines correspond instead to waste and trouble. Challenging aspects carry more energy, people are more willing to exert themselves there, and once the difficulty is handled, the satisfaction is greater than what flowing aspects alone can give. A square shows what you must deal with in your present experience; a trine shows what you will most likely flow into naturally.

Chapter 8: Cycles of Transformation: Part I Progressions

There are a dozen or more methods of progression, and Arroyo mainly discusses secondary progressions, a day for a year. He considers solar arc more oriented toward outer events, and thinks those concerned with a person's inner life should rely more on secondary progressions. He wants to speak of progressions in the language of experience rather than treat them only as indicators of outer events. When the progressed Sun aspects a natal planet, it is a period of becoming more like that planet. One case in his files, for example, is a twenty-five-year-old man with natal Saturn square Mars who had never dared to fight for anything he wanted. During the period when the progressed Sun was conjunct Mars, his confidence and courage grew a great deal, and he never went back to his old fearful, doubting self.

The progressed Moon moves quickly, taking about twenty-seven or twenty-eight years to complete a circle, which neatly complements the cycle of transiting Saturn. The house of the progressed Moon is the area your mind is drawn toward and keeps returning to; the house of transiting Saturn is the area where you are putting in effort, or being forced by circumstances to do so. When he himself married, his progressed Moon was sextile his natal Venus, exact to the minute, though at the time he knew nothing about progressions.

Chapter 9: Cycles of Transformation: Part II Transits

Arroyo says it took him many years to understand that transits are in essence very simple. Astrology deals mainly with four basic energies, the four elements, and transits simply set these energies flowing in a certain way and to a certain rhythm. That is why the same natal planet can behave much the same when touched by different transits. When transiting Saturn, Uranus or Pluto makes a challenging aspect to natal Mercury, for example, any of them may make a person want to leave some old friends behind, each for a different motive. With Saturn, one does not want to spend time and energy on people who are no help; with Uranus, these contacts seem too slow and dull; with Pluto, too shallow.

A transit is often exact three times, Neptune and Pluto even five, and should be seen as one whole process that begins before the first exact hit and ends only after the last. Of Saturn he says:

These transits don't cause problems; they simply pressure you to confront areas of your life where you lack discipline, structure, or inner strength.

The setbacks of a Saturn transit often come from having neglected some responsibility to oneself or to others, or from not seeing things as they are. So rather than asking when it will pass, first look at which responsibility you have been neglecting.

Chapter 10: The Ascendant & Midheaven: Vital Factors of Personality Structure

Arroyo admits that for many years of reading and many lectures he could not get hold of the Ascendant and Midheaven, until a great many one-to-one consultations, watching how many people express themselves, gave him a feel for them. The Ascendant has to be read together with its ruler: he says Aries rising can be divided into twelve kinds according to the sign Mars is in, and Taurus rising likewise into twelve according to where Venus falls.

The Midheaven sign, the Midheaven ruler and the planets in the tenth house together point to the kind of person you admire, respect and strive to become, and the older you get, the more you move in that direction. People with an Aries Midheaven admire strength and courage, for example, and those with a Pisces Midheaven admire compassion and intuition. The house of the Midheaven ruler is often where a person's true vocation shows most clearly; arriving there brings a sense of finally coming home and doing what one was meant to do.

Chapter 12: The Astrologer & Counseling

The last chapter is about the astrologer. Over the years, Arroyo says, he has come to realize more and more clearly that

it is not the astrology that matters so much as the astrologer

He has serious reservations about readily telling people what they should or should not do; the first question to ask ourselves is whether we really know what this person should do. Seeing clients again a few months later, he often found that they had either not followed his supposedly clever advice, or that something had happened soon after the conversation that put the whole problem in a different light. What an astrologer can give is insight, understanding and support, helping people see their relation to the cosmic cycles.

He often suggests a simple exercise to clients, especially useful during Neptune transits: draw three columns on a sheet of paper headed spiritual, mental and physical, think it over for a few days, write your ideals in each column as precisely as you can, and then move toward them step by step. Ideals change with age, and what you have written can be revised. Advice to a person should fit that person's ideals; advice that does not is worse than useless.

Arroyo explains in the introduction that the book does not set out to list ready-made interpretations, and assumes readers already know the basic meanings of signs, planets, houses and aspects. Those not yet familiar with them should fill in the basics first. As for order, you can start with Chapter 5 on Saturn and Chapter 9 on transits, since these two chapters come closest to what a person is going through and are the most concrete. When you reach an outer-planet transit you are currently under, go back to the parts of Chapters 3 and 4 on that planet. If you want to read charts for others, read Chapter 12 early.

The book has its difficult side. It was written in 1978, and when he revised it in 1992 Arroyo said surprisingly little was out of date, though if he were writing it now he would put many things differently. He often cites the Eastern religions, yoga and spiritual teachers he was reading in those years, and several chapters rest largely on such ideas; in the introduction he also admits that some passages are speculative, so you can take only the part about how he sees people. The Pluto chapter opens with a long stretch of astronomical data from the time, which can be skimmed. Chapter 6 works through the aspects between the three outer planets and the five personal planets pair by pair; read straight through it feels repetitive, and looking up the pairs in your own chart is enough. He uses the Koch house system, saying that after trying Placidus and several others he found Koch cusps the most accurate for the timing of planets changing houses; keep this in mind when reading the pages on Saturn moving through the houses.

What Arroyo says about Saturn is brought to bear on your own chart in Your Current Changes in Depth. Roughly every seven years transiting Saturn forms a conjunction, square or opposition to natal Saturn; the report first works out which of these stages you have now reached, then explains, following his account, what this stage asks you to adjust. He says the year Saturn first enters a house is the heaviest, and that as it nears the end of the house some event often gathers up the previous years, so the report also calculates which of your houses transiting Saturn is now in and in which year it crosses into the next, letting you see where the heaviest stretch lies and when it will close.

The report also calculates which house your progressed Moon is in and when it changes houses. Arroyo says its cycle neatly complements that of transiting Saturn: one is where your mind is drawn, the other where you are asked to put in effort. Which of your natal planets Saturn and the three outer planets will touch over the next five years is covered one by one, with all the dates calculated precisely by software. It reads these years of change through Saturn and the outer planets; for the full picture of a person's character, you need to go back to the whole chart.

In his last chapter Arroyo says that a birth chart is not finished once it has been done; it is a map that accompanies a person in coming to know himself. Only when you read the stretch you are living through now does the map really become useful.