The term “transpersonal” is used by different schools of philosophy and psychology in order to describe experiences and worldviews that extend beyond the personal level of the psyche, and beyond mundane worldly events. Transpersonal astrology is no different.
The most modern common usage of trans today has a sexual connotation. But the prefix itself far predates that narrow a meaning. You find the prefix trans used in words like translate, transport, transcribe, transplant, transatlantic, and scores of other common words.
According to Britannica Dictionary, the prefix trans means across, beyond, or to the other side of. That’s true if we are talking about one language we are translating to another, a toaster we are transporting to the cabin for the weekend, a word we are transcribing from voice to text, a heart we are transplanting from one body to another, or a transatlantic ship that is sailing across the ocean to another continent.
When applied to astrology, personal to transpersonal takes us beyond our narrow view of “self,” beyond the ego of ME to a broader concern of WE.
It’s easy today to plug in a name, a time, and a location on an astrology website or on your computer’s software and pop out a chart for any person you can think of as long as you know when and where she was born. Almost always the first chart someone plugs in is their own. Then some progress to a love interest, a friend perhaps. Sometimes a parent or a child or a difficult boss.
This kind of popular framework of astrology is personal. It’s about ME. Even when we stretch outside of ourselves, we tend to stretch only as far as MY. My friend, my mom, my son. Mine.
But personal astrology has not traditionally been the norm. It is today. But it hasn’t always been.
Think about calendars and clocks for one thing. It’s a bit unclear when the first mechanical clock was constructed, although most historians say it was somewhere around the 13th Century. But clocks were rare. And for centuries even after mechanical clocks were invented, the tolling of the bell in the town church was the closet contact to a timepiece most people had. And certainly for countess centuries before the mechanical clock, time was marked simply by sunrise, high noon, sunset, and somewhere around midnight. And seasons sometimes were seen more as cold and hot than specific days or even months.
The only births of any note that were worth marking the time down and casting astrological charts for were those of princes who may become King. The rest of us were born ‘the year after Aunt Aletha died’ or ‘the spring after the year of that big freeze.’
If we knew the year we were lucky. The birth time? Daylight.
As calendar and clocks become increasingly used by common people over the past five or six hundred years, we began paying attention to date and time because we were able to. The printing press eventually gave us calendars and we began sometimes having someone in the family who owned a watch.
And then in the early 1900s we had a huge shift of babies being born in hospitals rather than at home. And hospitals always had calendars and clocks. And births began being recorded immediately after birth by hospital staff. So birth data became widespread for everyone.
But remember, that was only about a hundred years ago that most people began having access to their exact birth times. And we saw a rise in personal astrology in the decades after that.
And then in the 1970s we began to have access to computerized astrology programs that a became more and more affordable. And in the 1980s we began to see astrology websites that let us plug in dates and times for free. And now astrology is something we all had access to. We may not all fully understand what it means. But we have access to it. Astrology is no longer reserved only for the birth of the future King.
So personal astrology, in that sense, is really a very new thing.
Today it is unusual for someone to not know our sun sign. Most of us even go beyond that to awareness of where the Moon or Venus or Mars is in our natal charts. Some of us learn enough to know we were born with a Grand Trine and with a Jupiter-Neptune conjunction in our natal charts. And as we learn more about astrology, we begin increasingly understand what these placement mean in our lives.
That’s personal astrology. And it is indeed a worthy study. And it’s study you more than likely have embarked on to one degree or another or you wouldn’t be reading anything on this website. Personal astrology is a wonderful gift to help each of us grow exponentially in a lifetime.
But a lot of what you will find of this website is not simply about personal astrology. The vast majority of what you will read on this website goes beyond personal astrology. It includes. But it goes beyond.
What you read on this website assumes not just a basic understanding of astrology, but a true student. I write about experiences and worldviews that go through the personal level of the individual psyche to that which is past it and that which surrounds it. My view of astrology takes a wider aperture than just a portrait. You will read here about world events and the energy that connects world events…the same energy that surrounds and energizes you personally.
Personal is part of transpersonal. It just not the only part.
When Mercury is retrograde or when the Moon is full at Summer Solstice, it is part of us all. It resonates for you in your natal chart. But in the same instant it resonates for the President of the United States, the the guy who sits next you in your office, the Pope in Rome, your high school football coach, your Uber driver, the Governor of New York, a child living on the street in Rio de Janiero, the other girl who likes your boyfriend, a high school dropout living in his grandmother’s basement, and the Prime Minister of Israel.
We are indeed each unique. And we each have a life to live, lessons to learn, a place in the Sun, and a destiny. But we are also here together.
That’s looking from the personal to the transpersonal.
And at its essence, that’s where astrology is the tie that binds.
Sonrisa East
4 September 2024