Intro to the Outro

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When you are a baby astrologer, all is wonder. You’ve got a Jupiter sign, a couple of freaky quincunxes---maybe you’re an inventor!---and 504, 305, 212 questions just begging to suck the bone marrow out of any visiting astrologer crazy enough to have lunch with you.

You start going to astrology conventions. Perfect strangers come up to you and ask, where’s your Mars, where’s your Venus? What a great world!

After a few more years or so of studying and casting horoscopes, you hit The Wall and bounce awhile. Maybe you need to go and look at Katmandu, take up fencing,

get away from twelve signs and houses. If you’re a professional astrologer you need the lousy money and you can’t get away. And your clients, your clients need you.

Somehow, you keep going. And if you’re lucky, you get a hobby. It could be another astrologer, a friend you can go to for a second opinion on a tough case. Or you go back to school. You join Habitat for Humanity or Amnesty International or the National Coalition For the Homeless, or all three. Some new planets get discovered, and you have to have a look. And one day, you wake up and realise that everything you have learned and all the horoscopes you have done and all the secrets you have kept have made you a very, very old, half-mad astrologer. (You can still be young and do this.)

Step a little closer so I can see you, Dearie. I want to show you something very special, something very, very old. Don’t be afraid, Sweetie, it’s in here somewhere, a photograph. Ah, here it is. A picture of the Universe when it was a baby. Thirteen billion years ago.

Like it? Let’s go look at it.