Review: Making the Gods Work for You: The Astrological Language of the Psyche

Making the Gods Work for You: The Astrological Language of the Psyche by Caroline W. Casey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is one of the most amazing I have read: a guided tour of the psyche, through the guise of the planets and the signs of the zodiac. Caroline Casey is uncannily able to articulate the "tone" of a planet or a sign in language that's deceptively clear.

An example:

"Pisceans want to—and often do, imaginatively and psychically—leave the decadent cities and occasionally the planet itself. This allows them to provide a needed perspective on life back down on Earth. Pisceans can be physically present and psychically gone, as in the trance states of Piscean psychic Edgar Cayce. Sometimes their unclarity, wooziness, and uncertainty of it all, as revealed in their rambling discourse, can drive you mad. “I’m either going to get married or go work on the Alaska Pipeline.” They cannot be reasoned with."

Notice the way she sneaks in ideas without you noticing. Her writing consists of islands of clarity insterspersed by twisting-snaking rivers of ambiguity that, while seemingly unclear, are actually clear in their own way: imagistically. Hers is an imaginal language, where metaphor is reality and reality is metaphor. Images are intelligble as images. What is Pisces? Two fishes. What does that mean? Well, let the fishes - their gills, their wateriness, the way they dart to the depths - teach you.

Her descriptions of the planets and the signs are like a speakable circumference around an unspeakable center. She does this masterfully. How does she do this? My only guess is that she had to "wrestle" with those energies to wrest them into physical form. She is truly a Trickter - she steals us fire from the gods.

PS - For those who like monotheism more than polytheism, consider this: the planets/gods are different qualities/energies,aspects of God, not unlike the 99 names of God in Islam. Christ violently cleansed the temple, taught esoterically, and loved tenderly. He is an embodiment of all the gods.

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