hey friends. lots to share today.
creation is a cancer rising
first, creation is a cancer rising. i started this series in the summer; it was the first series of writing that i put exclusively behind a paywall. i did this because i felt the material was sensitive; perhaps too sensitive for the uninitiated. in that work, i attempted to understand the thema mundi, the birth chart of creation, from the indigenous storyworlds i live within; from ojibwe and salish understandings of the world, from my heritage and my place.
i haven’t published another installment since the second piece, on the sun’s rulership of leo. this isn’t due to a lack of work; the whole series is written. but something has stopped me from publishing, maybe mercury’s retrograde, and i have to listen to that.
one element of my reticence is a hesitancy in sharing native stories without also sharing appropriate protocols; i do everything i can to honor protocol in my writing and research, and that should be more explicit. for a non-native audience, each piece perhaps needs a context statement. but that changes the work, changes the tone.
so what that experience is telling me is that i need to do that work first, which is what i’ve always done in my university work. for non-natives or a mixed group, the educational plan is: history and protocol first, sacred stories and culture second.
everyone wants “myths”!!! but you CANNOT start there, if you’re not native. native stories are not myths, they are not dead. they are sacred stories from living traditions, and they are not accessible to everybody. traditional stories are the cultural property of their nations, properties which are held and mutually owned by living indigenous people from those nations.
i made the mistake of referring to a figure from our ojibwe stories in an instagram live i did six months ago, during pisces season. my inbox was flooded with people asking for books to read “the myth” of that figure, a protective and very dangerous spirit. i didn’t respond to those messages and folks started blocking me. the impression i got was that i was only seen as valuable as a conduit for this spirit or their story, who folks from outside of our nation wanted to engage with, and that i (as the indigenous person who held the story) was seen as expendable or an impediment to them accessing the story. i’ve deleted the recording of that live.
i literally can’t imagine a native person sending me the types of messages these folks were sending. entitled, extractive, windigo behavior. sidenote: bless every native person who has ever come into my dms, and bless every native person who’s following me who hasn’t reached out because they don’t want to “bother me” (bother me!!! introduce urself plz).
if you’re reading this substack, i know you’re not that kind of person. only here for what you can get from me. i know this because i haven’t published at all in six weeks. you’re not “getting anything from me,” and yet you are still here. thank you.
forked tongues
THEREFORE, we are starting with history.
i present my first full course: FORKED TONGUES: AN ASTROLOGICAL HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.
i’m calling this a course in “astrological history,” after fellow history teacher astrologer gary lorentzen. this is not a class in “how to do mundane astrology,” but a practical class applying mundane, inceptional, and natal astrology to history and historical nativities.
this course is the first time that i’ll be able to teach exactly how i want. i’m modeling the overall design for course off the college-level us history class i’m teaching this fall, but in college and high school environments, i can only share part of what i’d like to. i have to keep out the spirituality, which for native history is really really difficult, and i have to temper down my own positionality (political beliefs, moral values, etc) to play to the whole room. and of course, i can’t incorporate astrology.
but history without astrology feels dead to me. just a long line of dates, names, stories that seem disconnected and separate. with astrology, we can see how history is related across time; how every saturn-pluto conjunction brings contraction and disease; how every jupiter-uranus conjunction brings quantum leaps in scientific discovery. and with astrology, we can see how history is related to time in place: how THIS alignment impacts THIS city’s inception, how this or that historical actor’s chart gets impacted and draws them into the fray.
i’ve been doing this kind of work on an individual basis in my place-based relations sessions, connecting individuals with the charts of their cities, states, nations, historical events. i’m really excited to offer this course, it feels like the next evolution.
this class is great for anyone who has a beginner’s understanding of astrology (planets signs houses aspects) and who wants to (re-) learn american history. from my background as a historian and native studies scholar, as a descendent of indigenous and settler americans, and as a cascadian and an anarchist and astrologer, i’ll guide you through my understanding of the past as best as i can.
this class specifically covers the time period from before colonization (“since time immemorial”) to the second great awakening, around the 1820s. my plan (ahem, you know what they say about plans) is to continue in the winter with another section for the period from 1820 to 1914, and then a third and final section in the spring for 1914 (world war one) to present.
THIS class, FORKED TONGUES, meets once a week on fridays or saturdays (see schedule) starting saturday, september 21, 9:30-11:30 am pacific time. we’ll meet for around two hours each week for eleven weeks.
the 11-week class is offered on a sliding scale at $444, $555, or $666, with an option for a three-month payment plan at any price tier.
personal updates
as FORKED TONGUES begins, i am also beginning the fall term as a professor and, also, as a student.
i left my high school teaching job last february after transphobic sexual harassment from students and an illegal lack of protection from school administration and my teachers’ union. this fall i’m teaching at south puget sound community college, the local community college in olympia. i’m glad to be returning to the college classroom, which just feels so fundamentally different than teaching high school. i’m teaching two classes online and one hybrid, in person a couple days a week. i’m glad to be in person again, even if it ties me to a place i feel like i’m outgrowing.
what’s that?
last spring, after i left my job, there was a lunar eclipse in libra that happened like RIGHT ON TOP of my fourth house ascendent ruler, the moon. because of the job thing, i couldn’t keep paying my exorbitant rent. can you believe a studio in olympia is $2,000 a month??? i became homeless and have been camping in the area for most of the summer, and couchsurfing with friends.
this lifestyle is unsustainable and not something i want to continue very much longer. i am a fourth houser; i need a home. i’m looking for housesits, roomstays, anything permanent but temporary (:
as much as i love oly, she has chewed me up and spit me out. i moved here for the high school teaching job, only to be met with harassment. i actually moved here after being outed while teaching in alaska, and one of my thoughts with the oly teaching job was: if i can’t be safe in washington, then i can’t be safe teaching anywhere. and that turned out to be the case.
i also was really excited to get involved with the caeli institute, the astrological library in olympia, when i moved here; alas, that proved to be a pipe dream. like the school, i was chewed up and spit out. used, extracted, excreted.
so ultimately, i think i’m looking for somewhere New. the northwest is Home in the deepest sense, but olympia feels like it doesn’t want me anymore.
but the community college thing keeps me here for now, at least for the next ten weeks or so.
and i’ve also enrolled in a program myself: the native pathways program at the evergreen state college.
i first became connected with npp through my high school teaching job; if you recall, i had founded a native studies program at the high school. it was interdisciplinary and muliyear: junior-level american history and literature, senior level composition and civics, taught from indigenous perspectives. it was shaping up to be really cool! before the sexual harassment forced me to quit lmao.
like honestly that shouldn’t have happened. shame on the olympia school district for not following the law and allowing illegal discrimination to take place. i wish i had the money to sue but here we are, barely surviving. mars natally in cancer and i experience marginalization upon marginalization. and now the native kids lost the only native teacher they had; the queer kids lost the only trans teacher they had.
anyway. connecting with the native pathways program at evergreen was a bright spot of all that, and after i quit, i just showed up and hung out in their faculty offices a lot, venting and crying and complaining to auntie dawn (the ~director~). every time i showed up, i ended up giving astrology readings and just vibing out. i love native people.
so this year, as a gift to myself, i’m studying officially with them. i’ve enrolled and everything. most of the work is online, except for a weekend a month on campus. i’m excited to get back into study as a student, and to refresh my native studies knowledge, and to connect with so many cool native scholars in olympia.
this pisces eclipse is in my ninth house; can you tell?
one-on-one offerings
my books are once again open for one-on-one consults once the term begins, so i want to close out by telling you a little about my current offerings.
i keep changing the name of my general astro reading, right now it’s astrology + tarot reading. this is the reading to get if you want a general intro to your chart, or if you have a specific question and want to get into it. we can cover almost anything in these sessions.
place-based relations sessions focus on your relationship to place: we start with your ic signature (a pallas k. augustine-ism), discuss ways to connect to place via ecological symbolism of your ic signature, and finally go into mundane charts of cities, states, treaties, whatever feels most relevant for your Places. the prep for these sessions is highly intuitive; sometimes the Place wants to share about settler-indigenous relations, while other places have other things to say.
ancestral constellations is a family synastry reading; we discuss your ancestors and your specific relationships with them. as long as you have a timed birth chart for yourself, the charts for ancestors can be untimed (though it’s so so cool when ancestors’ charts are timed!). these sessions are so healing, because we’re able to relate with our ancestors somewhat objectively through astrology, giving us an outside perspective on folks who deeply impacted our own lives.
fertility astrology is the art of determining auspicious times to conceive a child. i use the technique of the almuten of pregnancy and look into timing to see when that almuten will be activated. these sessions are deeply moving and personal. i’m honored to be able to hold space for this work.
and i have two ongoing research sessions right now.
the first is uranus-neptune, which is an alignment that i’ve been running cosmos + psyche reading circles on for a few months now. i’m interested in talking to folks who have uranus and neptune in their charts and to share the historical correlations; often my uranus-neptune folks have felt some pull towards uranus-neptune times and people. interested to see how that plays out.
the other research session is for our dark ice mother sedna. i can’t really talk about that one except to say, it’s a deep session. if she’s calling you, you know it. not for the faint of heart.
i have a sliding scale for my sessions (listed on the booking site) and returning clients receive a discount code. if you’ve had a session with me and need a reminder of the returning client code, just let me know. would love to see you again.
you can check my schedule and book a reading here.
--
thank you for reading. my intention is to have a piece of writing for you during this eclipse threshold moment; i’m processing some large orca news, a horrifying repetition of history. at the same time, i can’t rush it. i have mercury in scorpio, a fixed sign; the work cannot be hurried. i can’t rush the writing, or the emotional processing that is required to complete the writing.
not that you would want that. in the circles i hold (eclipse circles + reading circles), we share our charts to discuss our relationship with the astrological alignments. since it’s a circle (all points equidistant from the center) i also share my chart. upon seeing it, one of my participants asked how my mercury-pluto conjunction in scorpio felt.
i responded, if i’m writing something good, i feel like i’m going to throw up. it is so emotionally taxing, horrific, there is so much processing happening. and that’s how you know it’s good.
--
hope to see you soon. let me know if you have any questions about these offerings.
xoxo,
alex
This was beautiful, honest, and so heartfelt. Thank you for sharing Alex 💖🩵
Yes, knowing the astrological cycles makes it so much easier to remember when historical events took place (and knowing when historical events took place makes it easier to remember astrological cycles -- great feedback loop!). I thought I had an advantage in high school US history from living in a neighborhood where the streets were named after the US presidents in order. I did not know anything about astrology then, but that's even better!