Symbols and books

“All teems with symbol; the wise man is the man who in any one thing can read another.”

This famous quote from Plotinus is a bit deeper than our social media deems it to be.

It means that “symbol” is not an object, or a class of beings.

It’s a property of… well, of everything.

See, a symbol is something that allows us to think at another something: we hear people saying, for example, “the Moon is a symbol of the mother”.

That is a simplification.

Let’s forget myths, religious aspects, etc, for a moment to make this easier. There is nothing in the image itself of the Moon (bear with me), or in her course, speed, etc, that evokes mothers directly.

It might seem so, but if you medidate about why, you’ll reach the conclusion that almost everything you say of the Moon (she’s fast; she is closer to us; her color is pale, etc) is in fact a comparison between her in its entirety (shape and change of shape; color; speed; size) and the rest of the sky, mainly her planet companions.

She’s faster and closer to us than the other seven, she’s bigger than six of them, her color is paler, and so on.

So, the symbol “Moon” is, in fact, “the Moon in relation to the planets in the sky”. It’s a relation.

And what does she symbolize?

The mother? Well…

Not the mother as a whole. If the mother is a doctor, the Moon doesn’t mean her as a doctor. Mothers are also children of someone else, and the Moon (in this aspect) is no her as a child of someone else.

She symbolizes the mother in her relation to her children.

The symbol is a relation that implies another relation. This is the basis for what has been called symbolic thinking, analogical thinking, symbolic logic, symbolic dialectics, and a bunch of other terms.

It’s always a comparison between two “figures” and their respective backgrounds.

Now, you must be thinking that astrological symbols are privileged; they are there only to be perceived, not interacted with, they’re regular, and detached from our uncertainty.

Yes — but that does not mean they’re the only ones around. Their “special status” helps us a lot, but in fact there is nothing unique to them in regards to what makes them a symbol: being able to be perceived, having a relationship with their environment.

This same analogical structure holds for the lion (or the royal palm tree, or honey, or rosemary) in relation to the savannah and the king in relation to his kingdom.

The relation is the same in essence; in a way, all these point to the same relation, which lies behind all the others of the same type. That’s what René Guénon meant when he said all symbols point upward: the real symbolized is this relation that lies above.

So, to be a symbol is to be. To be and have essential relationshps with the environment. I say essential because the relationship of the lion with a disease, or with a Zoo cage, is not part of that.

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These unhealthy obsession with ancient written stuff that seems to define what a “traditional astrologer” is nowadays would have been seen by most astrologers of history as it is: a mental disease.

No one really thought (I don’t just mean astrologers. I mean no one) that people could learn crafts by reading a number of books until very recently, and this is not an example of progress.

The idea of writing a book so an stranger may learn from it enough to do what you do is weird even for today’s standards, let alone when most of the works we still have were written.

Textbooks were scarse and intended for the concrete students of the writer (and even this kind of book is very rare in what people call “Tradition” nowadays — I can think of the Treatise of the Sphere, by Sacrobosco, as a notable example).

It’s not that this attitude is new, of course. Astrologer had the bad habit of praising older texts since before Christianity, but they didn’t have the worse habit of actually believing it.

The vast majority of older astrological texts is marketing, as well as some from earlier periods. Others were propaganda.Some of them were notes for students, a few were attempts at preserving one’s own, or someone else’s, prior knowledge; and others were just to fulfill obligations (paid works for rich people).

I’m not saying they have no value, of course — I wouldn’t have translated and commented so many if that was not the case — but taking them for what they are is the first step in actually obtaining this value.

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OK, let’s go to horses again.

I lost my LILLYCOIN (read here and the previous emails to see what I”m talking about).

But, while victory last time didn’t make me happy, this loss did.

As far as I can see, I still don’t think “express” fits the bill.

“Rawalpindi” (I had to use Wiktionary) means “The Village of (Bappa) Rawal"; the village of a King and founder of a dinasty (and the word may also be used to mean the Pakistani military forces by metonymy). It makes sense, and I wish I had know in before.

As I said, I though Homestrait and Lady Lauren (don’t be fooled by the “Lady”, races are divided by sex, all these horses are females) were solar.

But R.E. and H. were already the two favorites. Lauren — which, to me at least, is the clearer option — was the last horse in the list, paying when I cast the chart, 36/1 (and according to this site from which I took the results, was still paying 25/1 at the time of the race.

In real life, with real money, betting on her to arrive in the first three places would probably still double one’s bet, at least.

And, last but not least, the three horses had some connection with the chart. If anyone just had bet on the three “solar horses” to win (provided they had made the Rawalpindi connection, which I hadn’t before) — that is, the same amount divided in the three horses — they would still have won. Peanuts (a .20 profit for every three dollars invested), it’s true, but a win nonetheless.

But that’s not real world, in which betfair is unable to recover my password and prevents me from opening another account. This is Fairy World, so I lost my LILLYCOIN, but still have 48 more to keep on betting.

So, let’s go. This one happens in a couple of minutes (Hippodrome de Marville, Saint-Malo, France, August the 6th, 2025, 19:33 - 07:33PM)

The fifth house makes a conjunction by antiscion with Mercury, in a couple degrees. I wanted it to be closer, but Idon’t have time to check all those stupid modern aspects.

So, Merc in Leo, ruling the sixth and the eighth.

These are the horses:

Lots of mercurial names: Histoire, Joy, Harabica, Hurricane, Hobby, Homer. If MErcury was in an air sign, I’d go with Hurricane; if he ruler either the third or the ninth, Harabica; the fifth, Hobby or Joy; if the conjunction with the Sun was close, Homer…

But here, it’s retrograde, going backwards (“to the past”), and he rules the eighth (other people’s money) and the sixth of bad things. I’ll go with Histoire du Lupin (remembering that “Arsène Lupin” was a thief).

And, of course, because it’s the favorite.

Pretty sure I’ll be looking at asteroids with weird French names for the next post, but:

1 LILLYCOIN in Histoire du Lupin to win, odds of 3.5 to 1.

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That’s it for today. See you soon!