Louise Edington - The Complete Guide to Astrology: Understanding Yourself, Your Signs, and Your Birth Chart

Copyright 2020 by Rockridge Press, Emeryville, California

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ISBN: Print 978-1-64611-166-4 | eBook 978-1-64611-167-1

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I dedicate this book to my friend Karen Krawczyk, who started me on the path of becoming an astrologer in 1989.

CONTENTS

The Complete Guide to Astrology: Understanding Yourself, Your Signs, and Your Birth Chart is written for everyone, from beginner to advanced practitioners and students. In this book, I endeavor to cover a wide range of information in an accessible and inclusive way.

I see the astrological chart as a blueprint of potential and possibility. You will never find me saying that any sign or placement is all good or all bad, and I believe that it is always possible to find a way through any challenges or blocks to growth, evolution, and compatibility. This book is written from that approach. We are nuanced and we all have the ability to consciously approach how we navigate our cosmic blueprint. That said, I do not use spiritual overridethat is, use spiritual practices to sidestep unresolved issues or woundsas I prefer to take a firm look at the shadow and how that shadow can be healed or integrated rather than bypassed.

I now invite you to look at the subject of gender differently. Astrological language has traditionally been binary, using male and female and masculine and feminine labels. Yet our astrological chart, or cosmic blueprint, contains every planet and sign, and therefore, they are all within each of us. The astrological chart does not show gender, so neither does this book. I focus on the whole person and their characteristics, removing binary identifiers entirely. The content of this book will give you a thorough grounding in key foundational areas of astrology and takes a radically different approach to astrological language as we come to understand that the planetary bodies and signs are innately nonbinary in nature.

Throughout this book I integrate the terms day and night to replace masculine/male and feminine/female respectively, as the two terms are less limiting. This is a concept that was used by the ancients and that loosely aligned with masculine and feminine for them. I will say more on this in . I would like to thank astrologer Jason Holley for introducing me to this concept and the work of Robert Hand and Brian Clark for helping me expand upon it.

The concepts of day and night allow us to take a more humanistic approach to the inner landscape of the soul. Therefore, although this book is partly an instruction manual to help you interpret your chart, its also asking you to take a more radical and nonbinary approach to the language of astrology.

I have always loved astrology. I still have things I wrote as young teen delineating sun-sign qualities. It wasnt until my first Saturn return at age 29 (when Saturn returns to the position it was at in ones natal chart) that I discovered what I then called real astrology. A friend read my chart for me and gave me some books and I was hooked. That was in 1989.

I devoured those books, taught myself how to hand-draw natal charts, bought and devoured more books, subscribed to magazines, and practiced on my friends and their children. I then got married and had children and my astrological intensity faded for a few years, though I never lost my fascination with astrology.

By October 2012, I had moved continents twice (from the United Kingdom to Australia to the United States), my children were 15 and 13, and I was working in the coaching world when I had a revelation that my purpose was to work as a professional astrologer. I worked with a teacher one-on-one and took other classes to hone the art, and within a few months I began to work professionally as an astrologer. I still take classes today, because astrology is a glorious and never-ending rabbit hole where there is always more to discover.

I have now done thousands of readings, run classes, and written astrology articles almost daily. In November 2018, I published my first book, Modern Astrology: Harness the Stars to Discover Your Souls True Purpose, which I wrote as a tool for personal growth. I am also a shamanic practitioner and an activist.

I am a Sagittarius sun with a Sagittarius stellium in the 11th and 12th houses, Sagittarius rising, and a Gemini moon. For those of you who already understand the basics of astrology, that will tell you that I am a writer, a teacher, and attracted to social and political justice, which I cannot help but bring into my work.