Being attracted to someone else when you’re already in a relationship can really wrench your heart in two. And, if that isn’t bad enough, finding out someone you trusted has cheated is one of the most shocking and painful things that can happen to anyone.
Come to think of it, being the third party isn’t much good, either. No wonder so many of us are so desperate for answers that we start consulting psychics and astrologers.
Now that my disaster with a married man is firmly in the past, I can tell you a lot more about my experience with astrology and tarot during that roller-coaster time and its miserable aftermath.
What good are these divination tools? Are they of any use at all?
The Good:
I can say with certainty that astrology, especially, contains a lot of truth, especially if you are only looking to elucidate character traits of two (or three) people in a relationship, and patterns of relating that are likely to spring up between you, for good or for ill. I found our natal and relationship charts to be so descriptive of our characters and how we behaved in our relationships that seeing these things spelled out in our charts helped me make some very wise decisions.
I even started studying astrology as a result of this relationship. Fortunately (or unfortunately, as the case may be), I grew up with a BPD mom, and the constant family upheaval I lived through led me to spend most of my life reading books by therapists on mental illness, codependency, toxic parents, love and relationship addiction, marriage and relationship dynamics … you name it.
So, when I saw codependency being diagrammed in a horoscope chart, I knew what I was looking at. And I knew what questions to ask my affair partner, so when I saw the same thing in a horoscope chart, I knew the truth had already been affirmed. Similarly, when I read charts for people, they’ve always emailed back to tell me what I wrote them was correct, with corroborating detail.
The biggest thing that stood out to me in mine and my affair partner’s relationship charts, for example, was an aspect called Moon Opposition Neptune, which reflected that there would be a lot of dishonesty in the relationship.
Well, of course! you say. It was an affair!
But, believe it or not, that wasn’t what this particular Moon Opp Neptune was referring to. Although Moon Opp Neptune deception can reflect anything from willful crime to being two-timed by a malignant narcissist, in this case it was telling me the guy I was in love with was a terrible codependent. Which was confirmed by his natal chart, and by his personal history (alcoholic mom.)
What Moon Opp Neptune tells us is not only that one person is being deceived, but that that person really doesn’t want to see the truth, and the deceiver is also at least partially deceiving himself.
Which was absolutely the case: My guy had such low self-esteem, he would bend himself into a pretzel for someone else’s approval, and not even realize for ten years that he really wasn’t happy with what he had agreed on to please the other person.
This was what I gleaned when he spoke about his relationship with his wife. And when I looked at their relationship charts? There it was again: Moon Opp Neptune!
What that told me was that, if we stayed together, our relationship stood an excellent chance of turning out just like theirs … partially because I was just as controlling as his wife was! And I didn’t like hearing that about myself at all.
But it was true. The more and more I read those charts and looked up what expert astrologers had to say about the aspects, the more and more I recognized myself. And the more I saw the warnings, when the guy came back to me two years after we broke up, not to step in and try to control the situation again, or I would be risking a horrible outcome.
I have diagrammed all of this and more here.
The Bad:
The bad comes when you try to make predictions.
I’ve had a fair number of things I saw in these charts, and in the chart of my late husband, come true. I predicted when my late husband was likely to pass away. I was one week off.
Not only my astrologer, Alice Portman of Adelaide, Australia, but also myself, predicted I’d hear from my guy again in October of 2017. This also happened. At the time, I was taking an astrology class locally. I rushed in the week after, so excited that this was in the charts, and it actually happened! In class, my teacher and my more experienced classmates pulled even more aspects out of the charts than either Alice or I had seen, consistent with this happening.
Perhaps the funniest prediction I made happened when I was perusing his wife’s chart and saw an indication that she would either start a crafts business or enter an important vocation in May of 2017. Since from what I knew of her I didn’t think she would start a craft business, I figured it would be a vocation, and I imagined it would probably be the highest office of a national organization I knew she had been involved in most of her life.
Imagine how confused I was when I looked up this organization and discovered that people only hold the top office for six months! Since her chart was telling me she was going to hold this post for three years.
But then I was terribly confused. Generally, if you become the head of a local chapter of anything, most of those terms are only for a year … right? Until I did some more snooping and discovered that this local post, people tend to hold for a number of years.
Curious, I watched the Facebook posts of this group, and when the position came open in the early spring of 2017, her name came up as a candidate. I realized not only that this was indeed what the horoscope was talking about, but that she would win.
She did. Funny enough, she planned to step down in May of 2020 … right when that aspect in her chart ended … but ended up staying a year longer due to covid 19.
But you can’t always predict events in the horoscope, even when the charts are screaming that this or the other really should be happening in the life.
Why not?
The Ugly:
The truth is that horoscope charting does not determine what happens in our lives. We do.
And, this can be misleading.
Our natal charts talk about the highest potential we could reach in our lives. And, when the time comes, our transits might talk themselves blue in the face about it.
But I’m coming to understand that most people don’t reach their highest potential in life. For instance, right about now, my chart is on about how I’m supposed to reach some success in writing in the next three to five years, and possibly change my career to something I’ve always wanted (which, yes, would be writing.)
But I’m beginning to see that that will never be the case. My two novels made the short list on Wattpad this year … but no one reads them. My last one gets nothing but bad comments.
You cannot be a self-supporting writer without an audience, and clearly, I am not good enough. So, if that prediction comes true over the next three to five years, I’ll eat my hair.
I have a number of transits over the same time period describing me missing the mark, which I appear to be doing now. And I don’t expect some violent streak of genius to blaze through my mind and steer me suddenly off my current course: Day job, retirement, nursing home.
(I’ll let you know in five years.)
Similarly, my affair partner has a ton of transits coming up over the next four years describing him waking up suddenly and killing it with his codependency, growing up, making tons of progress, and ending his sixties a whole new person.
(Coincidentally, these transits run alongside another storyline depicting a breakup and a new relationship of some sort. And, um … the wife’s chart has a storyline where she doesn’t know what hit her.)
But … the other outcome is detailed also, where he makes no progress and ends his life a very sad and unhappy old man.
He’s still in that marriage, and he’s quit lurking on my website finally, after seven long years, so if that happens, clearly it’s happening without me.
But, I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t happen at all. Just as I have no storytelling genius, this guy has no guts.
So, you can be seriously mislead by a horoscope’s glorious tales of a person’s highest potential. One thing I’ve seen is that life is tough, and many things can sidetrack a person. So, if you’re looking through horoscopes scouting for a good ending to your difficult relationship, and you see one —
Don’t you count on it.
And for fuck’s sake, don’t ever use it as a reason to wait on someone. I did that, and now I see that it’s time to give up and move on. Especially when transits are there that describe an alternative.
At least I spent six years mopping up old childhood wounds. I would never have been ready for a relationship anyhow until all that was cleaned up. So, it wasn’t a total waste of time.
(And I can show you where those are in my horoscope.)
What About Tarot Cards?
Tarot cards are more short-term than astrology. They will tell you the current mood of a situation, for about three months, usually no more than a year. As such, they can be useful, but they can also be confusing.
I’ve found that multiple tarot readings can talk about different aspects of the same problem or relationship — all of which may be true at the same time. And if you watch or do too many, you can start getting conflicting predictions. Then what do you do?
It’s like what my husband used to say about dietary studies that told you eggs were bad for you, and then several years later more came out that said they weren’t. “Wait long enough, and you can hear whatever you want.”
For this reason, I don’t use tarot cards to predict the future, and I take anything I see in a chart with a grain of salt. Your best use of tarot is to listen to a reading and ask yourself: “Could anything about this be true? Is there anything here I could learn from?” And if the answer is yes — even if it’s hard to hear, especially if it’s hard to hear — then learn that lesson.
The most important thing with astrology and tarot is, always compare your readings with reality.
I know what our horoscopes say about our characters and the problems we would have in our relationship — if we ever actually had one — are probably the truth, because I have so many books and writings from therapists about how a codependent relationship evolves.
But then I look at what our charts say about our futures, and I have to compare that to reality, too. Am I ever going to be the next J. K. Rowling? Not according to my writer’s groups and my comments on Wattpad. Is he ever going to get UN-codependent and leave that marriage? Not according to what I’m looking at.
But, keeping that in mind, I’ve actually steered around some big mistakes looking ahead in astrology, and I’ve learned a lot about myself with tarot.
So, if you’re struggling and looking for answers, you could include these modalities along with your therapy and any books you might be reading.
In my experience, the two complement one another nicely.
I’ve made more progress faster with them than without them.