On the Lord of Divination: Earth and Mars⛰️
Exploring divination by element and the planets that rule them.
This essay is Part IV of a continuing series exploring the Lord of Divination in astrology, a planet used to understand your relationship to the unseen. If you are interested in learning about what that is, how to calculate yours and what, exactly, your Lord of Divination signifies, check out the introductory essay in the series. If you want to learn about Fire and Saturn, click here. For the essay on Moon and Water, click here. The final essay on the series, Air and Jupiter, will be released in a few weeks.
The Lord of Divination is determined through the triplicity lords of the 9th house. In this newsletter, we will be focusing on the divinatory practice of Earth risings and their corresponding Lord of Divination, Mars. By whole sign houses, one’s first house and one’s ninth house, where the Lord of Divination is decided, always share the same element. Risings of the same element also have the same planet acting as their Lord of Divination. I use this pattern to explore what divination through the elements look like and what support/shape the ruling planet gives the element.
If you use quadrant houses, which may shift the sign ruling your 9th house, then use that too! Even if you don’t have an earth rising, check your quadrant houses to see if your 9th house is ruled by an earth sign. In that case, this information will be relevant to you too. And if your Lord of Divination is in an earth sign, this information will be relevant to you too.
Most of what I speak about will be framed using Gaston Bachelard’s books on the elements. Bachelard is a poet and philosopher, not an astrologer, but the elements are fundamental to human consciousness and why not get out of the strictly astro cave every once in a while? The language of the stars is spoken everywhere.
May this assay ground and deepen your understanding of the element ⛰️
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Depth
“You wish to know what is going on inside things and yet you are content to view them from outside; you wish to savor the pith but stick at the bark.”
Gaston Bachelard
To know the earth element is to know matter; you know it when you place your feet on the soil that supports you or when you lean your body against a tree and it doesn’t budge. On a basic level, we can rely on the earth element because it is cold and dry. Cold means its sinks and compresses into itself; dry means its doesn’t meld or fuse with the objects around it. as water does, but stays contained and boundaried.
This condensing of matter also lends the earth element, as Gaston Bachelard points out in “Earth and Reveries of Repose”, a great amount of depth; like an archaeologist or geologist, a diviner of earth must do some digging to get to the core of a thing’s meaning. Bachelard compares this external digging, of finding “that fossil of light embedded in ‘black earth,’” with our own inner depths: “The greatest secrets of our being are hidden from us, however: they lie in the secrecy of our depths”. When we “dream” of what the density of the earth element contains, or allow ourselves to really “dig” into a concept or question, “we dream our own depth” as well.
To do so you must not merely dwell on the surface, which is easy enough, but enter the heart of the thing you wish to know. This takes time and effort, especially if the earth element shapes your divinatory potential. You may find yourself having to fit into a very small space or deal with a very limited scope of study.
But for the earth element, smallness is no hindrance to complexity.
The Kingdom in a Shell
One of the major things Bachelard emphasizes for ultimate creative understanding is the value of images; having some tangible object or visual scene to which you can return in order to ground your reverie or divinatory practice. For the earth element, Bachelard is especially fond of using a nutshell to signify earthly imagination. He first draws on one of my most favorite lines from Hamlet: “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams”.
He goes on to say that “the whole sky fits into the space of a rose. The world comes and lives in a perfume”. Each tiny space is a microcosm for the whole universe and earthy diviners would do well to sit with this thought. He sees the nut as a voluntary containment within the infinite interior that conveys an almost childlike “early happiness. We would live in it contentedly if early dreams of happiness, of well-guarded inferiority, could be found there”. If not for our own limits or “bad dreams” we could find anything we need in infinitely small spaces. We just have to look.
Earthy diviners are well-advised, then, to take their time when divining. Keep your scope small and let the details of the miniscule flood your vision. Bachelard puts it best: “Go carefully…through your life’s surroundings, inspecting every floorboard in your bedchamber and every corner and curl yourself up so that you may lodge within the innermost, last spiral of your snail shell.” Know the inside of your inner nutshell as well; that will tell you your unique take on matter.
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