Mark Jones Astrology Blog

Happy New Year Everyone!

I hope you all had a festive holiday period. Mine was a quiet one, at home with my family; a welcome break from all the activity of the preceding months of work. My daughter was not old enough to understand the meaning of Christmas but she was the perfect age to embody it. Hanging out with her, chasing her away from frequent attempts to depopulate the bauble population on the Christmas tree was a sheer delight!

In the last days of the decade I began to write on the Lunar Nodes. Now, at the end of the first week of the new decade I have completed a draft of chapter 1 and the initial section of chapter 2 in what will become a 4 chapter book.  The Destiny Line will explore the nodal axis of the Moon as a dynamic system: like two poles that contain the flow of an electrical current, the nodes of the Moon together hold the charge of meaning for the individual life. The book will expand on my prior writing (the second chapter of Healing the Soul: Pluto, Uranus and the Lunar Nodes) and teaching (an extensive series of webinars for the Astrology University) on the nodes of the Moon to present a technically simple but psychologically profound template for the interpretive power of the natal chart.

An unexpected opportunity left me able to pick up work on the Planetary Node research recently.  I was able to write a final chapter for the book as well as being able to respond to edits, so it looks very likely that early next year the book will finally be out. It will represent decades of research for me and three close years of research for me and my primary researcher Patrick Graham. We very much hope to make a substantial contribution to the field with our work.

After such a long period of investigation I can genuinely say that I experience the extra information that the planetary nodes offer as akin to an invisible architecture behind human history on an individual and collective level. 

For example, let’s take the chart of Malala Yousafzai (12 July 1997 8:30 am Mingaora, Pakistan. Rodden Rating C) which I will be looking at (from a non-planetary node perspective) on my upcoming Astrology University Summit lecture on the weekend of the 26/27 Oct, 2019.

Originally published in The Mountain Astrologer magazine. Reprinted with permission.

The ideas presented in this article are meant as a commentary on the nature of two people coming together for an astrology reading. In exploring psychotherapeutic ideas for astrologers, I am not arguing for a psychological astrology, that is, a psychological method as the underlying astrological approach. This article is designed to introduce core insights from the world of depth psychology to assist the astrologer of any technical persuasion to understand some of the issues and dynamics that can arise when any two people meet for the purposes of guidance or healing.

An astrology reading involves a counselling dynamic. It sounds simple, but there is an underlying radicalism to what I am asserting: that regardless of your astrological approach — traditional, evolutionary, psychological, Vedic, medical, etc. — when an individual consults you for advice, help, and support, a therapeutic relationship comes into being, if only for one hour.

Furthermore, this is the case whether or not the client (or even, for that matter, the astrologer) is conscious of it. An astrologer may feel that they are simply disseminating their specialised information to a client; however, there is still a counselling dynamic that will stir certain forces within the client’s — and, potentially, the astrologer’s — unconscious. The reading may not occur in person; it may be recorded or in writing. Nevertheless, it includes a counselling aspect to the relationship.

My premise is that through being more conscious of core therapeutic ideas, we can better serve the realization of our client’s true potential. If we exclude the client, we actually close down the greatest source of information and transformational potential that exists in the course of the session. For the birth chart is only a map. It’s a multidimensional map, for sure — one that can shift from flora and fauna, to geology, to social demographics and a route finder and back again! Yet, a map is not the territory. No matter how brilliant, it is still just a map and not the place itself. The place itself is the psyche of the individual, and the individual sits before you in the reading, literally or virtually. Ignoring this person is like ignoring the Grand Canyon to study the map of it instead.

Last night I taught a webinar for the Astrology University on the theme of Meetings with Remarkable People, during part of which I looked at the remarkable relationship of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan, her youthful teacher. Helen was made both deaf and eventually blind at 19 months old by a severe childhood illness. Distressed by the world around her that she sensed but could not participate in, Helen became a wild and disruptive child, wreaking havoc in the gentrified environment of her southern country home.

Anne Sullivan, herself partially sighted, had escaped the poorhouse as a young teenager by pleading with a visiting dignitary that she receives an education. With that education finally under her belt she accepted the first job that could pay her enough to continue her life - until on the 3rd of March 1887, she stepped off a train in Tuscumbia, Alabama full of prejudice against the south, and yet full of determination to reach out to her wilful charge, Helen. Helen Keller, with the transiting nodes on March 3rd, exactly square her natal Pluto in Taurus, later described that day as her soul’s birthday.

The beauty of this phrase and its curious vitality struck me as I gave the online seminar. It seemed as I said the words as if I was describing the essence of the natal chart itself; some secret potential within astrology that it might speak to our soul: a crucial part of the attraction of the field to so many of us.

by Patrick Graham

In addition to viewing Planetary Nodes around a chart in the Chart View window, you can also access a list of Planetary Nodes and their aspects to planets. This can be useful for viewing a more detailed list of Applying and Separating aspects.

There are 3 methods for accessing the Chart Reports screen.

1. From the main Solar Fire screen simply click Reports on the top menu bar and then Current Chart.

How to view Planetary Nodes in Solar Fire

by Patrick Graham

In this tutorial I am going to show you how to view Planetary Node positions around a natal chart using Solar Fire Gold v.8.

1.  We first need to create the file that contains the Planetary Node positions.  This is very easy. Start by going to Chart Options – Extra Ring Points:

Originally published in The Mountain Astrologer magazine. Reprinted with permission.

This interview was conducted by Adam Sommer for his podcast on October 16, 2015.

Adam Sommer: Welcome, Mark, to the Exploring Astrology podcast. Thank you so much for coming on the show!

Mark Jones: Thank you for inviting me.

AS: It’s so great to be able to hear you so clearly via Skype, even though I’m having Internet problems here at home.

MJ: The 21st century does bring some magical things, doesn’t it? We can have an intimate conversation while thousands of miles apart, and relatively effortlessly, without paying for it or making any grand gestures. Only 150 years ago, we’d have had to travel for months to speak to a particular person.

AS: To give everyone a little background, I recently heard Mark speak during the Evolutionary Astrology Network’s online conference, “Real Money and Lasting Love. It was a beautiful conglomeration of Evolutionary astrologers speaking about their passion. I believe the title of your lecture, Mark, was “Radical Empowerment: The Nature of the Pluto–Uranus Square.” It was, in many ways, a great inspiration for me. A lot of the references you mentioned really hit home — especially the work of Rupert Sheldrake and Stan Grof, who have been incredibly important in the development of my own work.

I’d like to start with a question about how you combine your long-time practice as a Psychosynthesis therapist with astrology. How did the two come together for you?

MJ: I’ll start in a strange location and then work my way back. Recently, a colleague was speaking at a Psychosynthesis conference in Rome, and the two of us were privileged to gain access to the Institute of Psychosynthesis. It’s located in Florence, Italy, in the home of the founder, Roberto Assagioli. Right away, we noticed boxes of files piled up on the floor, and when we went through them, we discovered they were all on the topic of spiritual astrology, in English! How ironic that I should make this discovery years after I had trained in Psychosynthesis, and years after I’d already become an astrologer! I had completed Noel Tyl’s Masters in Counseling Astrology program, then began the Psychosynthesis training, and went on to study the evolutionary work of Jeffrey Wolf Green around the same time, graduating from all in 2002. After the training, it took quite a while to build a private practice, and then there was the ongoing endurance test of hours of regular therapy clients each week. With all of that going on, I put astrology on a back burner.

In his inspirational book The War of Art, writer Steven Pressfield describes the moment he stopped running away:

“I washed up in New York a few decades ago making twenty bucks a night driving a cab and running away full-time from doing my work. One night, alone in my $110-a-month sublet, I hit bottom in terms of having diverted myself into so many phoney channels so many times that I couldn’t rationalize it for one more evening. I dragged out my ancient Smith Corona, dreading the experience as pointless, fruitless, meaningless, not to say the most painful exercise I could think of. For two hours I made myself sit there…”

Now, the reader, primed here by the aphoristic style that Steven has developed in his self-help books (ostensibly books about how to write, but actually books about how to live) thinks this is a lead-in to the story of how he created his great work. But no…

“I made myself sit there, torturing out some trash that I chucked immediately into the shitcan. That was enough.”

A depressing situation perhaps: I can certainly imagine some inner voice arising: “all this time and all you finally produce when you actually try is rubbish!” - a voice that if listened to would confirm all at once the very worst fears about oneself. Isn’t this very crisis why so many of us never try at all?