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Struggling with Work-Life Balance? Blame the Romans
One of the biggest challenges of being an astrologer in the 21st century — aside from the strange looks I get when I insist that interpreting star charts is my real job — is inheriting a framework that was originally designed for ancient Roman aristocrats.
Celebrities are infamous for consulting astrologers. Princess Diana’s astrologer was her confidant. Robert Downey Jr. wrote a cover blurb for one of astrologer Steven Forrest’s books.
There’s a legend in the astrology community that Ronald Reagan got his “Teflon president” reputation because an astrologer helped him schedule his bad news press conferences for times when they would do him the least harm.
Politicians, royals, and movie stars are known for being eccentric, but I am not a celebrity astrologer. My clients are ordinary people. Most of them are going through some kind of transition. They don’t need a mental health practitioner, but they need help, in the words of Mary Oliver, finding their place “in the family of things.”
Helping you find your place in society is exactly what astrology was designed to do. That anyone still finds astrology’s model of society relevant is a wonder. That it speaks to ordinary people without much editing says a lot about the influence of Roman society on ours. We’ve inherited a lot more from Rome than roads.
Still, working with a system that is at least 2000 years old has its challenges, and one of the biggest challenges involves career.
The Pyramid of Privilege
Geometry is the foundation of astrology. As an astrologer, I spend my day finding meaning in angles, triangles, circles, squares, and lines.
The shape that is most relevant to career is a triangle I call the Pyramid of Privilege. The pyramid is a highly simplified picture of how things got done in Roman society.
The bottom of the pyramid was made of the wealth and slaves who propped up the Roman aristocracy at the top of the pyramid.
Slaves (and women and some young men) did all the menial labor and messy stuff necessary to make the lifestyles of Roman aristocrats possible. They cooked and cleaned and harvested the grain. They weaved cloth…
