Turning Fashion into Devotion

Notes on Remediation through our clothing

Boticelli, “Birth of Venus”

✨Last Day: Styling with the Stars Sale✨

If you want to learn more about the specific styles of each planet, check out my Styling with the Stars Guidebooks, which are all about using fashion as a form of devotion of enhancing your own becoming.

The guidebooks contain all the following juicy info: 

Volume I: The Fashion Archetypes of the 7 Traditional Planets

Volume II: How to use your Natal Chart to create your Iconic Style

Volume III: Delineating your Style based on your Venus decan

All of the wisdom within these guidebooks cannot be found anywhere else. They contain a unique combination of my research, creative synthesis and point of view to show how divine our style can be and how our fashion can be powerful, vital, significant, shaped by the stars. 

Today is the last day you can purchase these guidebooks, as well as the three-volume bundle, at 20% off.

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I am not here to merely talk and think about astrology: I want to live it. I want my knowledge of the stars to open up my connection to the world and its unfolding, interlocking cycles.

A big thing studying astrology gives me is attunement to forces larger than my small self, or the felt sense that I am a part of a complex whole. In this vein, even the seemingly inconsequential details of our lives can be meaningful and bit by bit align our existence with spirits, deities, beings, energies, etc that make up the universe.

In astrology, we call this concept of healing or strengthening certain parts of our lives through sympathetic actions “remediation”. If you want to learn more about this concept, I encourage you to check out my newsletter on the subject.

The reason I created Styling with the Stars was to help people of all astrology knowledge levels connect to the planets in a creative, embodied manner. Today, I want to dive deep into fashion and remediation, hopefully helping you turn the daily process of outfit selection into a ritual, a spell, a prayer.

What is Remediation?

From my Remediation essay:

The word remediation comes from the word “remedy,” indicating the cure of an illness. Etymologically, it comes from the Latin “re” meaning “back” or “again,” and mederi, meaning “to heal”.² So another translation of remediation is the act of healing again, or perhaps returning to a lost wholeness. So much of healing is about fortifying a whole system to work in harmony with all its moving parts. It posits that we started out whole and then we have to go through a process of disharmony to then arrive back at a more conscious, wiser, form of integration.

It reminds me of an adage I would hear frequently at the monastery: we may be whole and complete, lacking nothing, but we still have work to do. There’s also an external component to remediation: you are not causing problems in your life, but your planetary configurations or natal chart is making it difficult! As I will explain, what I love about remediation is that is suggests that by participating in our earthly life more fully, we can have some agency over our divine fates and configurations. As above so below, so why not allow the everyday to inform the heavenly?

Generally, remediation focuses on a specific planet that needs help in your chart or whose energies align with those you want to call in.

The most common forms of remediation in the western astrological tradition are ritual and prayer, planetary charity, and correspondences. The first is pretty self explanatory: if you want to invite more of Jupiter into your life, light a candle and some incense and pray to him. The second involves donating time or money to an organization that serves the “children” of the remediated planet. For Mercury, for example, donating to a local library or to Wikipedia is the way to go.

Finally, we have correspondences, or directly engaging with things in your life that share their nature with a specific planet. These corresponding objects can be virtually anything: hobbies and activities; foods; gems and metals; plants, animals and, of course, clothes. You can invite more Mars in, for example, by eating hot peppers, practicing martial arts or welding; getting cupping done; hanging out with veterans or chefs; wearing rubies or the color red.

I created Styling with the Stars to help people engage with this kind of planetary dressing beyond the colors assigned to the planets. What does dressing like Mars look like beyond wearing red? What sort of styles or garments help one feel into his strength and power?

Clothing and Venus

Before I get into specifics I want to speak to the nature of fashion itself. Most personal efforts at beautification and adornment fall under the auspices of Venus. Abu Ma’shar ascribes “clothing, adornments of gold and silver and jewels…beautiful appearances, beautiful clothes…adornment of flowers, gems, jeweled crowns, necklaces, dyed clothes, dyes, dyers, silk-making, shopping and enjoying shopping” to the Lesser Benefic.¹ In other words, the act of putting more thought and intention into what you wear, regardless of what other planets you may be trying to embody, is Venus remediation.

I found something interesting happened to my life as I engaged more directly with my sense of style. Pleasure and beauty felt more accessible. I danced more. Treated myself just because. Hung out with friends. Flirted. Smelled more flowers. By spending time aligning what I wore to my ever-shifting sense of self, I made the delights of my life more present, even exalted them. By paying attention and turning my style into an act of devotion, my sense of enchantment and aesthetics infused other areas of my life and showed me, experientially, the mystical power of dressing up.