Astrology is unique in that it sits between intuition and observation, and is a uniquely multidisciplinary art. It is genuinely the oldest art and science, spanning all of recorded (and likely unrecorded) history. Astrology covers literally every aspect of observable experience, because it is a symbolic map of the components of reality which happens to mirror it perfectly and synchronistically. The more you study astrology, the more you realize just how it can encapsulate everything, but we ourselves are limited in our perspective and awareness. Thus, understanding astrology deeply demands familiarity and study of astronomy, psychology, history, sociology, mythology, esotericism, and the occult. This can also extend to mathematics, physics, epistemology, philosophy, semiotics, linguistics, and more.
Along these lines, astrology can do many things.
It can be used for self-knowledge to understand ourselves.
It can help us have higher highs and higher lows by letting us take advantage of the good times and know when to buckle down in bad times.
It can help us understand people and their nature.
It can be used to predict the shape of the future, for oneself, individuals, countries and organizations, and the entire world.
It can be used proactively to choose when to do things for the best results by aligning with the skies (electional astrology)
It can be used to ask direct questions in a divinatory fashion (with horary astrology)
Most importantly, we can use astrology to bring ourselves in alignment with our fate and purpose, while contending with the chance and fortune that happens to befall us. Because astrology also, and in fact primarily, points to both fate and fortune in the span of a lifetime.
The tricky part is that astrology can also become a cage. It can be such a dominating frame that it's difficult to escape. Learning astrology is a series of increasingly deep existential crises until you either stop thinking about it or embrace amor fati, the love of one's fate. It's one thing to know about what's going to happen; one also needs to embrace agency and the drive of their true will. Meanwhile, reality is complicated and difficult, and sometimes you need tools to push on it to get your way. And by that, I mean magic.
Magic as a way to bend reality
"Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will." - Aleister Crowley
This quote is very broad, and includes both "magical" types of acts as well as mundane, physical ones. But our reality is a union of the immaterial and the manifest. Intention works on matter and matter affects intention, or will. Being able to affect any kind of meaningful material impact on the world, to change it or breathe something new into existence or help someone, is simultaneously mythical, magical, and highly meaningful. This has to be worked in the flesh, because we live in a physical reality bounded by time. But our efforts can be aided significantly through nonphysical magical operations that apply to our reality, or even better, to ourselves.
More pragmatically, what kinds of things do I usually mean when I say "magic"? Planetary patronage, manifestation, working and communicating with gods and spirits, bodily energy work, imaginal visualization, divination, talismanic work, and more. Many mundane things are also acts of magic and can be enhanced by thinking of them magically. But when I talk about magic, I mean the body of practice that acknowledges the existence of meaning and active intelligence present in the universe and the existence of non-physical, non-local, invisible forces which affect us.
Crowley calls it science and art because on the one hand, magic requires careful observation, testing, and understanding of magical principles; and on the other requires creativity, intuition, and aesthetic expression. "Will" is your true desires which come from the inner part of you that seeks to accomplish something in this lifetime. These inner parts are sometimes referred to as the true self, the higher self, the holy guardian angel, or the daimon.
Of course, not all magic has to go to a deep and sacred purpose; sometimes, you need to pay the bills or eject someone from your life. But done well, magic inevitably brings us on a path closer to ourselves. We lean into the mythic patterns of our fate and learn how to tango and negotiate with them, rather than be blind victims to them. Magic is an underlying current beneath astrology and divination in general, so it is important to be aware of.
An unfortunate truth about magic, astrology, and everything else is that these things just lead us straight back to ourselves. Rather than being an escape from reality, eventually these practices can hit in a way that reveals just how real it all actually is. That this life is the visceral moment, not just in the mundane but also in the archetypal and superreal. There is a particular experience I call overrealization, which is when you suddenly realize that all of the immaterial things perfectly match the real, with a visceral feeling of intentionality. This is to say that engaging in these practices leads you right back to yourself, because as above, so below.
In general, it's important to know that astrology can be intense and mentally destabilizing. That is true even more so for magic, which can also be deeply life-altering. Always do divination on any significant working first, and make sure you are actually able to accept the change into your life and being.
Why do magic and astrology work? What even is reality?
"If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you musn't seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white." - Henry James
The "one white crow" quote has stuck with me ever since I read it in Surviving Death. I've collected many white crows in my years of exploration and experimentation, and when you find evidence of something that is not explainable by your current model of the world, you must take it seriously if you want to be intellectually honest and rigorous. I do not consider any of my practice to be taken on faith. All of my most firmly held beliefs are based on direct experience, and my loose speculations about the broader nature of reality are based on extrapolations from those experiences.
If you've had even mild exposure to methods of divination such as astrology and tarot, or with intentional manifestation and synchronicity, you know that there is something mysterious happening in the structure of the universe. The overculture's scientific materialist paradigm does not properly explain it, and frankly pretends it isn't happening at all.
This contradiction is what ultimately led me to ask the question: what even is reality?
The science of time and space
At the core of these questions is the very nature of existence and the universe itself. British philosopher John Polkinghorne has said of science: "Give us one free miracle, and we'll explain the rest."
This refers to the origin of the universe, particularly the Big Bang theory. Scientific models of the universe's nature and structure in a post-Bang era are quite sound, but they can only speculate at what initial conditions had enough power to cause the Big Bang in the first place. That is more the domain of mystics, theologians, and metaphysicists. We will get there, but first we should work backwards from what is actually observable about the universe and how that relates.
There's a fair amount of evidence in theoretical and quantum physics which can gesture at possible mechanisms or paradigms for how effects such as manifestation or astrological synchronicity work. Providing hard "proof" of what we do isn't interesting to me, but understanding the potential mechanisms of how all this works is.
In quantum physics, subatomic particles like protons, neutrons, and electrons exist in multiple possible states simultaneously--a phenomenon called superposition—until they're measured or observed. This behavior is demonstrated in the double-slit experiment, where individual particles like photons or electrons pass through two parallel slits and create an interference pattern on a screen, as if each particle somehow travels through both slits at once like a wave. However, when scientists place detectors at the slits to observe which path each particle takes, the interference pattern disappears and particles behave like discrete objects going through just one slit or the other. This suggests that the very act of measurement causes the particle's wave of possibilities to "collapse" into a single definite state.
Schrödinger's cat thought experiment further illustrates this peculiar concept by extending quantum superposition to the macroscopic world. In this scenario, a cat is placed in a sealed box with a radioactive atom that might or might not decay and trigger a mechanism that would kill the cat. According to quantum mechanics, until someone opens the box to observe the outcome, the radioactive atom exists in a superposition of decayed and not-decayed states, theoretically leaving the cat in a bizarre quantum limbo—simultaneously alive and dead.
Fundamentally, what we are talking about is observation as it relates to spacetime. In the book The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli explains that "time is ignorance". There is no such thing as the "present"--it's a local phenomenon resulting from the observation of our immediate bubble. As Rovelli puts it, "There is no special moment [elsewhere in the distant universe] that corresponds to what constitutes the present here and now." Rather than being one universal flow, time is structured more like separate "cones" of possibility which interact and overlap independently. In physics, a light cone represents all possible paths that light could take from a particular event in spacetime. The past light cone includes all events that could have influenced our current moment, while the future light cone includes all events we could potentially influence.
Matter that exists beyond our observation has an indeterminate temporal relationship to us, functionally existing outside of our timeline. Rovelli says "concreteness only occurs in relation to a physical system", meaning that anything unknown is, as far as we over-on-planet-earth are concerned, exists outside of (our) time. Events outside our light cone are in a very literal sense neither in the past nor future--they exist in a separate spacetime that has no fixed temporal relationship to us. Reality isn't made of "things" that exist independently and happen to interact, but from the interactions themselves.
When we look through a telescope to see a galaxy billions of light-years away, we're seeing them as they were billions of years ago. There's no way to say what is happening "now" in those galaxies relative to us. But even that moment in the past was indeterminate until we look to see it. The witnessing of time is like a quantum wave collapse whereby our observation stitches together the time from previously separate places. Our observation establishes a temporal relationship between ourselves and the distant object, "collapsing" the various possibilities into one specific timeline connecting us to that object.
Of course, this is still not a "complete" timeline--the parts that we cannot see that may still be subjectively visible to other time-cones or streams will have their own unique interrelationships. Each observation can be thought as spinning a thread of temporal connection between observer and observed. These threads don't exist independently of the act of observation—they're created by it. When we look at distant galaxies, we're weaving ourselves into relationship with regions of spacetime that otherwise have no fixed temporal relationship to us.
This is a paradoxical and mind-bending fact about the nature of time, but it's also an important restriction. If we could somehow actually observe the entire universe, everything would appear to be motionless. The distinction between past, present, and future would dissolve. This is because relativity--subjectivity--is required for time to pass. To be omniscient is to be both everything and nothing simultaneously.
This idea parallels the act of divination, regardless of form. With lot-casting forms of divination such as cards, dice, or I Ching, a field of randomness or indeterminacy is actually key to providing a surface which can expose meaningful information. This is conceptually similar to quantum wave collapse, but instead of observing some physical system, we are asking a question of a source of randomness which then yields to us a specific answer.
The reasons why these answers seem to be so consistently meaningful is one that traditional materialist science is not equipped to handle.
Synchronicity and meaning
Jung defines synchronicity as "a meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved." Specifically, synchronicity describes the occurrence of an inner psychological state with a meaningful corresponding external event with no causal connection between the two. Jung believed that unconscious and matter are derivations of the a singular, unitary reality which exists outside space, time, and normal laws of causality. These synchronicities frequently activate archetypes, universal patterns or motifs that exist in the collective unconscious. Another word for these is myths, or mythemes. When an archetype is activated, it may manifest simultaneously psychologically as well as in external reality.
We can think of stellar bodies in astrology as synchronistic focal points for archetypal themes and mythemes. The planets are explicitly associated with many myths, gods, and their stories throughout all sky-worshipping cultures, and the fixed stars frequently have their own stories which have popped up independently among cultures that had little or no known contact with each other. (Specific examples: Sirius, the Pleiades, and Orion, among others.) Astrologers engaged in stellar gnosis (knowledge of spiritual mysteries) know that this is no coincidence. The planets and fixed stars have intelligence and personhood which align with their myth-nature, which is demonstrated by the transits or activations of these bodies in the natal chart.
To engage with the stars in an intentional way is to become a more active participant in your own personal myths, described by the natal chart. When we look at a chart, or at the actual stars in the sky, we are connecting with their lore, myth-structures, and associated archetypes. We observe and ask questions (whether explicit or implicit), and we connect our awareness to the spacetime-streams of the stars.
There is a continuum of precognition, or the ability to perceive and predict the future. On the one hand you have raw psychic ability: visions, impressions, knowing feelings, and so on. On the other, you have ostensibly mechanical methods such as astrology, which has fairly rigorous and structured rules of interpretation which can be so consistent that it is sometimes said to have a "grammar". However, many astrologers are also psychic, using a natal chart as a scrying mirror. Many of the most powerfully accurate predictions cannot be rationally described to a precise point or configuration in astrology, but rather come from a mixture of experience, intuition, and combined evidence in the chart which may not still feel "conclusive" on dry examination. Some astrologers do attempt to shut down their intuition entirely in an attempt to feel "rigorous" and "scientific". But I believe that even within the most technical approaches, astrological prediction involves some form of precognition or genuine future sight, facilitated by consciously pointing one's attention toward a specific time and reaching out to make a connection between ourselves and the future.
After all, we already do this in our dreams.
Time loops
Freud believed that dreams are wish fulfillment, or the unconscious repressed desires of the psyche seeking conscious expression. Jung had a more comprehensive perspective on dreams. He believed that dreams compensate for the conscious personality, express the collective unconscious, and serve as gateways to active imagination and mythological experiences. He also felt that dreams offered prophetic warnings, or precognition, which could be both personal and collective. In the years preceding World War I, he experienced a series of disturbing dreams and visions of violence and bloodshed covering Europe. However, Jung mostly focused on the acausal nature of synchronicity in his treatment of dreams and the unconscious.
Eric Wargo, on the other hand, has done deep research into the topic of precognition, particularly as it relates to dreams. He wrote two books: Time Loops, and Precognitive Dreamwork and The Long Self. In Time Loops he discusses the theory and evidence for the precognitive abilities of the mind, and in Precognitive Dreamwork he discusses precognition and retrocausation as it relates to dreams. He warns us that "effect before cause" is a real possibility.
Wargo makes the case that the arrow of time is not absolute for biology. Our nervous system can respond to future stimuli, which is strong evidence of retrocausation at work in living systems. He presents presentiment experiments which gauge how subjects' bodies react to stimuli seconds before that stimulus actually occurs, implying the body "knows" what is coming. This is like touching a hot stove, but the hand jerks before the stove is ever touched. Scientists have discovered that quantum processes such as entanglement and tunneling are essential to biological functions, and Wargo suggests that the human brain may be like a 4-dimensional tesseract, whose fourth dimension operates through time, and that this may be an evolutionary strategy that comes to us all the way from the bacterial stage of life. If true, this would mean that the brain can occasionally forecast the future because it's using actual future events as input to its predictions.
Physics does not absolutely forbid time loops, and they can happen in certain experimental conditions. Wargo suggests that precognition is possible if we live in a block universe, which is a theory that describes spacetime as an unchanging four-dimensional "block" which contains all events in past, present, and future simultaneously, as opposed to a three-dimensional reality which time modulates. This is a very old idea, going all the way back to Parmenides in late 6th century BC, and is also referred to as eternalism. The mathematical idea of spacetime itself corresponds to a block universe and bears out for predictions and practical usage in contemporary physics. In a block universe, precognition may not be a "paranormal" phenomenon which breaks the known laws of physics but simply a logical part of how spacetime works. Our conscious minds filter out massive amounts of information so we can operate in present reality, but in the right conditions (i.e. dreaming or alternate states of consciousness) we can perceive the information in the past and future directly. This might also be a modality through which other ESP phenomena such as telepathy and clairvoyance operate. In the case of premonitions of danger, our future surviving self could be sending back warnings, an act of self-preservation backwards through time.
I personally feel that Eric Wargo applies the time loop against all conceivable spooky action to mild excess. He is largely right, but experience with beings possessing and delivering knowledge we ourselves do not have shows that there is more going on than just our selves spanning our entire lives--but these also participate in the precognitive, retrocausal nature of spacetime or perhaps even rest outside of it.
In Precognitive Dreamwork, Wargo builds upon these conceptual building blocks and tackles the issue of dreams on a more personal level. He asserts that dreams are like a mnemonic system using vivid symbols to encode future events. Precognitive dreams seem to use memories and recent experiences as "past bricks" to build "future towers" as scenarios of upcoming events. Most importantly, dreams involve the weird wyrd--that is, the Old English word for fate or destiny. Dreams often fulfill wishes and reveal destiny simultaneously. (After all, how much difference is there between desire and destiny, anyway?) The unconscious can precognitively use a future event to satisfy a current wish symbolically and prepare for the emotional impact of it in the future when the person experiences its actual occurrence. Precognition does not deal exclusively in cold factual info; it's intricately woven in with our hopes and fears.
Wargo describes dreamtime as a world where things are non-linear, our intent and questions matter, and meaningful coincidences guide us. He describes how prophecies, big and small follow self-referential loops in time and their patterns appear to repeat fractally at personal and collective levels. Precognitive content often uses archetypal imagery, which Jung would posit lives outside the bounds of time itself in the collective unconscious and is thus ever-present and available for the mind.
Time loops are fascinating because they suggest retrocausation. Events which happen in the future can lead to their causes in the past. Novikov's self-consistency principle asserts that paradoxes in time travel are simply not possible; if any event exists that would cause a paradox or "change" to the past whatsoever, the chance of that event is zero. Instead, what Wargo suggests is that precognition of a future event or retrocausation of a past event establishes a consistent chain of events. This means that a prophecy can cause the actions which fulfill it, as opposed to preventing it, ensuring that the perceived event does come to pass.
Perhaps this is analogous to observing a time cone as per Rovelli's description from The Order of Time? By witnessing the future, a previously unobserved stream of time becomes "stitched" to the present, and fixes the time loop in our timeline. I am unsure just how deterministic this is in reality. The block model as eternalism is inherently deterministic, but there are alternate interpretations which incorporate quantum mechanics such as the many worlds interpretation where the block universe contains all possible timelines branching from quantum events.
One thing I can say for sure is that experiencing a prophetic vision--or doing divination--indelibly puts one in relation to the future, impacting the present. The moment you draw a tarot card on a question involving the future, you are forced into a choice. You can either act on the information in a manner different to what you were planning to, or you can double down on your original choice. Or, if you had no planned course of action, you now have to consider if you want to do something. Once we ask about the future, we cannot help but be polarized toward it. Much like the nature of precognitive dreams, divination demands participation. We want to know about something, and we involve our subjectivity in it. It involves our own hopes and dreams, or those we divine for. We can, of course, ask idly out of curiosity, but the result tends to be just as lackluster without a focusing question or desire.
Wargo suggests that these time loops are so personal and profoundly meaningful because of the Long Self, the version of oneself whose awareness spans all of time and your entire lived experience. When we receive that feeling of significance around a dream, that is our future self sending information back to us from the point of the future event, which creates the sensation of meaning at the cause it creates via its time loop.
Katarche, divination, and prophecy
Horary astrology--derived from the term "horoscope"--is a form of astrology which allows you to answer arbitrary questions in the same way you might use a tarot deck to answer questions. You or the "querent" (person with the query) get an urge to ask a question, and then you cast a chart for that moment. The chart then depicts the answer to the question, including the context, background, and outcome. The rationale for the practice of horary astrology is that the moment someone urgently feels the question pressing upon them, the answer is encoded into that moment.
In the book The Moment of Astrology, Geoffrey Cornelius unpacks horary astrology and the idea of katarche, which means "beginning" or "inception". In Hellenistic and Roman times, katarche applied to the practice of electional astrology. Cornelius argues that the connotations of katarche lie in its origins as related to ritual, sacrificial, and divinatory practices, and that every inception is in fact a kind of petition or prayer, as opposed to a mechanical and scientific calculation based off of an abstract rationale. To perform divination is to ask God (or some other being or beings) a question and to look at the universe for an answer.
It's important to note that actually, all engagement with astrology (or any form of divination (or magic)) is likely katarchic in nature. The description of inceptions, especially according to modern perceptions of electional astrology, implies an almost mechanistic depiction of the universe where one simply needs to choose the correct time to do something to get a specific result. But this is likely a smokescreen.
From my essay, Astrology and the Sin of Knowledge:
His prime example is the attack by The Humanist journal in their 1975 September/October issue called "Objections to Astrology", wherein they included a "random" person's astrological chart as a supplementary example of how absurd astrology is. Except when read according to the rules of horary, which is consulting the sky to answer arbitrary questions. Cornelius does this deftly. The chart perfectly describes the attack itself against astrology according to traditional rules of interpretation! Cornelius' argument: this is evidence of a divinatory moment. The fact that the writers of The Humanist objection "arbitrarily" chose a person's chart that perfectly describes their own point is evidence that the arrival of an astrologer to interpret the chart is a divinatory moment or a katarche.
The fact is, any time we look at a chart or cards or dice or anything with the intention to divine, we are entering into communication with the universe and its implicit meaning.
Yet that communication and perception is not necessarily tied to the actual factual information about the present moment, or even a past moment as is the case with the Humanist chart. Many professional astrologers have had the experience of performing a stellar and accurate astrological reading for someone whose chart turned out to be absolutely incorrect, off by hours and sometimes even days. This happens because they were tuned in to the divinatory moment itself.
Intent can wholly define how we read a chart, even if it is structurally the same. Horary astrologers in particular occasionally have moments where they receive functionally the same chart from two different querents asking different questions simultaneously. The same chart can be read accurately for their individual concern, indicating that there is no "objective" chart, nor an "objective" way to read a chart. Even automated tools which might purport to predict or track astrology in a realtime manner still require a human to look at them and interpret their meaning, whose intention in interpretation is what drives the nature of the information transmitted from the universe, even if it is digitally.
A key part of horary astrology that makes the idea of katarche particularly profound and interesting is that in horary astrology, the date and time you cast the chart has a direct implication to the validity of the chart. A difference of two hours, or sometimes even minutes or seconds, can completely change the apparent answer to a question because the configuration of the chart changes significantly with a different rising sign. It's common wisdom that consulting astrologers should cast the question for the moment they understand the question being asked, or for individuals doing horary for themselves, the moment they truly feel the pressing urge to pose the question and examine a chart. There are also occasional "considerations before judgment" which suggest that the question is invalid, too vague, would not be accepted by the client, would be incorrectly interpreted by the astrologer, or simply cannot be answered at this time.
This suggests that katarchic moments may themselves initiate a time loop, or perhaps we receive the urge to ask the question from having experienced its resolution in the future. A famous example of the self-reinforcing effect of prophecy is the Greek tragedy of Oedipus. His parents, King Laius and Queen Jocasta of Thebes, hear the prophecy from the oracle of Apollo at Delphi that he would kill his father and marry his mother, which led to them abandoning him. Oedipus is rescued and given to another family, until Oedipus learns of the prophecy himself and flees from his adopted parents to avoid fulfilling the prophecy. Of course, this leads him to encounter his real father Laius and kill him during a quarrel, and then eventually comes to marry Jocasta after becoming king of Thebes as reward for killing the Sphinx.
What this story teaches is that fate and prophecy cannot be avoided, but most especially if one attempts to run from one's fate. If receiving true prophecy is like setting up a time loop, then the future has already happened, because you received the prophecy and reacted to it in a way that ensured the future has already occurred. Could a different outcome be possible? Fate loves irony, so what might have happened had Laius and Jocasta accepted their fate willingly? Logically, we can say that Oedipus could have been told of the prophecy with knowledge of who his true parents were, and just... made sure not to do that.
While the nature of these things means that we can never truly say for sure, I feel intuitively that on a spiritual level, we have no choice but to run toward our fate rather than away from it. There seems to be a kind of inversion principle to the way we handle life and ourselves. The more we struggle to avoid and ignore something, the more furiously it comes to find us. This is why we learn astrology, to learn to embrace our fullest natal potential and attempt to understand it, rather than trying to flee from it and inevitably being subsumed by it. There are forces far greater than us at work in and across our lives, and swimming upstream will inevitably tire us out and wash us away. This is one of the lessons of Oedipus--he fell into his prophecy because he was blind to his own identity, and once he succumbed to it, he blinded himself in punishment.
I think every day divination has a bit more wiggle room. For instance, a common occurrence is doing tarot readings while anxious or distressed and receiving cards that are decidedly negative. Novice readers will sometimes interpret these as confirmation of their worst fears, while more experienced readers tend to view these cards as directly addressing their emotional state, saying: "you need to calm down, you're not going to get an accurate answer right now." Perhaps the answer could be both things--if you were to remain in this state of high anxiety or distress related to your question, you would through your own actions (or inaction) cause the negative outcome to come about. Calming down and asking again later can yield the "real" answer, but perhaps this answer is just as real as the previous one, but we have released the possibility of the previous negative outcome by changing our relationship to it.
Does this count as a time loop? Maybe, maybe not. Many diviners view divination as probabilistic, in that it portrays the most likely future outcome based on current conditions. If conditions change, so does the likely future. This does not seem as ironclad as Eric Wargo's inevitable time loops. Maybe you could argue that this is just us tuning in to a "different reality" where we abandon the old divinatory time-loop-thread--but if that's the case, why couldn't we do the same with major prophecy? Perhaps it is a matter of scale and impact. Leaving aside trying to put the time loop theory on a subject with infinite subtlety, if we consider our perception and motion of spacetime to be composed of overlapping "streams", perhaps certain streams are simply bigger than others. Divination about what to have for breakfast could be like a small creek, whereas prophecy about the purpose of one's life is like a rushing rapid--both harder to escape, and far more noticeable when entered.
Will, fate, and the daimon
The ancients, including the Greeks and many Indo-European cultures, viewed life as being like a thread, where fate is like a tapestry, intricately woven and vast beyond human comprehension, with each life woven into the greater design. The idea of time loops as well as astrological cycles parallels the thread metaphor, literal loops and circular motions intertwining with one another into a hugely complex fabric.
The ancients considered fate to be immutable and fixed. Once your life is woven into the tapestry of destiny, you can't change it. Modern perspectives leave a bit of room for free will, and many astrologers I talk to tend to believe that there are major "plot points" in our lives which are fixed and predetermined, with wiggle room for free will in-between. Psychics I've spoken to and new age mystics seem to believe in the idea of "soul contracts" as well as the ability to renegotiate them, and magicians as a group tend to believe in the overriding power of personal Will.
This, of course, begs the question of what "Will" is, in the first place. The idea of a "True Will" comes from Aleister Crowley and is central to Thelema. "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law". This Will is one's authentic purpose, a destined path, or higher calling--fundamentally, one's reason for incarnating. These are distinguished from the everyday, casual desires of the ego: animal desires and base instinctual needs such as sensual pleasure and distraction. (But for what it's worth, those things are absolutely part of life's purpose for some people.)
There are multiple takes on Will within various magical traditions, of which these are but a few:
Hermetic traditions emphasize Will as the focused attention and intention of the magician, directed through ritual and symbolism
Chaos magic views Will as a psychological force that can be directed to reshape subjective reality through the manipulation of belief
Traditional ceremonial magic often views Will as a faculty that must be cultivated through discipline and purification before effective magical work can be done
How do we square Will with the idea of fate? Three major ways Will has been viewed through these traditions and ancient history are as an instrument and mechanism of fate, a means for navigation within the bounds of fate, and as a means of transformation of fate, usually with help.
A key component of discovering one's Will in the Western occult tradition is the communication with the Holy Guardian Angel, or the daimon. The Long Self that Eric Wargo describes in Precognitive Dreamwork is very similar to this, though the purpose and idea of the daimon is far more expansive and mystical in nature. The daimon is a complex concept that has evolved over time.
In the Homeric period (~800-700 BCE), daimones were divine power or spirits that influenced human affairs, influencing emotions, thoughts, and bring good or bad fortune. These weren't considered personalized spirits but manifestations of divine will. Hesiod (~700 BCE) described daimones as souls of the dead of the Golden Age who became guardian spirits watching over mortals. In the classical Greek period (5th-4th centuries BCE), Socrates famously had a personal daimon who spoke to him as an inner voice or divine sign warning him against danger. Plato (4th century BCE) expanded the concept in his "Myth of Er" in Republic, describing each soul choosing its destiny before birth and being assigned a daimon, who serves as a companion and guide throughout life.
The Hellenistic era (323-30 BCE) saw the development of more complex astrological techniques which showed the nature of the daimon in the birth chart, and in the Neoplatonic Period (3rd-6th centuries CE), philosophers such as Iamblichus and Proclus saw daimons as mediators between humans and higher divine realms, describing a hierarchical cosmology with personal daimons as intermediary guides. The Early Medieval Period (5th-10th centuries) saw Christian and Jewish angelology develop the concepts of personal guardian angels, influenced by earlier pagan concepts but reframed within monotheistic contexts. In the Medieval to Renaissance period (11th-16th centuries), Hermetic and magical traditions developed more esoteric interpretations of the idea, evolving toward the explicit concept of the "Holy Guardian Angel" as a specific entity. In the Early Modern period (17th century and on) the Holy Guardian Angel would become more formalized in Western esoteric traditions, and it continues to this day.
I do not necessarily recommend that just anyone attempt to contact one's daimon without serious forethought and affirmative omens. But the idea is important to mention, because the HGA is a key part of the modern occult conception of will and has many implications for how we consider fate and prophecy. The work of astrology and magic also sooner or later butt up against the very spiritual core of oneself, and you may feel your daimon call to you--or you may realize you already knew it the whole time.
The HGA is important to consider in relationship to Will, because it is a being that exists outside of time, much like the Long Self. If it is the source of our true inspirations and desires, we need to consider the possibility that the ego's idea of free will is illusory, or at least incredibly limited in perspective. Our decisions may come to us from a source beneath or outside our conscious awareness, at least until we become aware of it. This is not an easy task, and is considered to be difficult and strenuous, particularly because to become aware of one's daimon is to realize how small and insignificant the ego is in comparison to one's true nature and purpose on earth.
Even with that awareness, free will is important, because our awareness does operate on a different scale and in a way that extremely big disincarnate spiritual beings like the HGA cannot necessarily understand or manipulate directly. In the meantime, free will is also an important illusion to keep us invested and playing the game.
Whether we accept the Holy Guardian Angel (or similar) as a real entity or simply point to fate or precognitive retrocausal time loops, it's obvious and apparent if you pay attention that we are subject to some sort of intelligence(s) which live outside time, and we have to reckon with that. Even magic itself begs the same question: did I have a successful magical outcome because I performed the magical ritual, or did I perform the magical ritual because I had the successful magical outcome and I had to make sure I did it? From what origin did the desire or result come? Perhaps both also came from a place outside normal causality itself.
On the other end of the spectrum, even skilled astrologers who elect moments for action sometimes find that their best efforts at gaming the system are stymied, with their choices narrowed to a pathway that seems fated. These moments seem to reveal that we cannot arbitrarily control outcomes but that we are constantly in relationship to that thing which is bigger than ourselves.
To a large degree, we are simply along for the ride. For those of us who are inclined to it (and have the natal potential described to it), we have the opportunity to learn and wield tools that help us understand that ride a little better, and sometimes even nudge it in one direction or another. All the while, we look, listen, and feel for the signs and omens of our unfolding lives and the hints of our innermost selves. For me, astrology is one of the best maps for following those clues. The birth chart is a question asked of the universe, and how well we live up to its potential is our answer.
Supplemental Reading
Writing
Dancing with the Gods - an essay on the experience of a secular man encountering the gods
Around Here We Take Our Phenomenology Seriously - by Sadalsuud - by me, on treating one's own experience seriously and cultural barriers to doing so
Astrology and the Sin of Knowledge - by Sadalsuud - by me, on time, observation, loops, and knowing - covers some of the same ground in this post but related to the "sin" of knowing
Books
The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli - mind-blowing book on the structure of time and its implications
Precognitive Dreamwork and the Long Self: Interpreting Messages from Your Future by Eric Wargo - On precognitive dreams and time loops
Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious by Eric Wargo - A more academic, theoretical approach to the topic of time loops
Six Ways: Approaches & Entries for Practical Magic by Aidan Wachter - A solid primer on magic with simple practices
Psychic Witch: A Metaphysical Guide to Meditation, Magick & Manifestation by Mat Auryn - A book on magic; Leans heavy into witchy aesthetics, full of very good fundamental exercises
Holy Daimon by Frater Acher - on the Holy Guardian Angel or Daimon
Makes ya wonder who was looking at the sub-atomic particle that phase changed into the so-called "big bang"