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Excerpt from The IC: An Astrology of Coming Home
“The IC as the darkest part of the chart is the deepest part of the forest. It’s where the witches gather and the gorillas play. It’s where the children are wild and the elders are trusted. Because it is unknowable by rational means, it is overlooked and denied. By focusing on the Midheaven, what is visible, public, authoritative, western astrology glosses over a fertile, magical source of knowledge.
As astrology becomes further institutionalized and accredited, for good reasons such as ethics, but also in a bid for popular validation, I don’t want to forget the poetry of it, the hidden pieces, the dark places. Many of us won’t and can’t forget, of course, and a balance of rigour and imagination is the most common way to practice astrology, but there is always a risk of loss when we prioritize technique and empiricism over lived experience and romance. I want to balance depth of knowledge and rigour of technique with the expansive uncertainty that is exploring the unknown, which necessitates memory and poetry and dream, the irrational and ungraspable.
If the dark places cannot be dominated, cannot be known through rational means, must they be denied? Why stare at something we have no hope of seeing? Why feel ourselves into something we can’t integrate through rational means? To stand in the dark, in the unknown, and view the astrological chart from the IC is not to attempt to drag it up to the light, to transmute the shadows into something tangible, but simply to be able to observe it, acknowledge it, find its edges to see how we bump up against it exactly because we can’t see it.
We work with the IC to understand there is a darkness, there is an Other, there is relationship with ancestor, spirit, land, history, where we are eternally safe, where we belong. We are stardust and tides. We are wax and wane and worry and warmth. Nowhere do we more strongly connect to these facts, I believe, than at the “bottom of the sky,” at our IC, our Imum Coeli. We live with knowledges we may not even know we have, that we’ve perhaps forgotten as we crawl toward the light."
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Your guide to the IC:
Pallas K. Augustine is a consulting astrologer, educator, and writer. Their practice is rooted in a relational approach that aims to deeply connect us with our non-human and non-living kin as well as to each other.
By acknowledging and investing in ecological concerns, land relations, animist spiritualities, and ancestral healing, Pallas’ work goes beyond self-reflection and towards regeneration of intricate and nuanced interrelationship.
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Check out the Patreon where more of my research and IC book updates are available. The Patreon supports the very creation of the book.
Funds from the Producers’ Tier go directly to paying the designers and editors well and come with personal acknowledgement in the book.
At the Patreon, you also get a discount code for my webinars on the IC:
Untangling Roots: Working with the IC for Healing and Liberation is a depth exploration to the bottom of the chart to discover ways to investigate and support shadow work, healing, ancestral, and magical practices through a deeper relationship with the IC. From an in-depth client case story of an IC in Taurus, Pallas will guide us through a journey of queerness, settler colonialism, whiteness, ancestry, family estrangement, and transformative justice.
The Astrology of Coming Home: Ancestry, Memory, and Spirit in the Chart carries similar themes, but through theory, personal narrative, and in-depth case stories of an IC in Taurus and IC in Pisces from Pallas’ professional client work, we'll listen to voices of childhood loss, estrangement, displacement, illness, passion, queerness, intuition, creativity, recovery, and deep healing.
Thank you for being here.