Interview: Christopher Warnock, Esq. Renaissance Astrology (and a free gift)

I was fortunate enough to have a nice long chat with Christopher Warnock, a leading Traditional Astrologer who runs the website Renaissance Astrology and his own blog. After five minutes into the interview, I realized that it was going to be both the easiest and most difficult interview I've ever had to conduct. First off, the man knows his stuff which is refreshing but it also makes my follow-up work a little more taxing and time consuming. I asked him one question and he was off, being overly generous with his knowledge of astrology. I only had 4 real questions for him, simple enough right? He talked for over an hour! Below is only a glimpse of what he shared with me. I just didn't have enough time to transcribe the entire conversation, and to be honest - there's just too much for a single blog post. You really need to take one of his courses to fully grasp some of the concepts outlined below.

It's necessary to point out that before he even begins teaching his students, he claims it's necessary to teach them how to think. They need to change their view of reality before they can begin to contemplate the way real Astrology works. A man after my own heart... er... well, we have the same feeling towards what he calls the modern "world view". First off, if you come to this blog with a staunch belief in Modern Astrology, you will need to go back and read a few of my other posts regarding how the universe really tends to operate. Astrology as we know it today is really only about 100 years old, as Mr. Warnock says, whereas Traditional Astrology dates back thousands of years. There must be a reason its light was somehow kept fueled, if even only dimly.

Without any further ado, here are the simple questions I asked and an overview of the answers he gave. If you want to know more about the interview, feel free to leave a comment and I will gladly respond.

How did you come to study law and astrology?

I studied law first. I went to college originally in the US then I studied at St. Andrews, which is the oldest college in Scotland. It was supposed to be for a year and I ended up staying for three years and graduating from there, so I kind of started to move off the track there - and I actually studied Renaissance history. And so at that point I could choose between studying at Cambridge and get a PhD or go to law school, and I thought "Oh, I'll be rich and powerful so I'll do that". So I went to law school, University of Michigan, and they kind of trapped us into large law firms either in New York or Washington D.C. so I went to D.C.

At the same time I realized that I was interested in following a spiritual path so I decided to look around and read and explore that. Then I had a case involving the definition of a month, and a month is the amount of time it takes the moon to orbit the earth. So I got interested in the study of those types of cycles and that's essentially what astrology is, the study of cycles. So I originally looked at Modern Astrology which is predominately psychological and is very new age. It's fine if you want to look at someone's birth chart and figure out their personality, it works fine for that. If I was a psychologist or social worker I would definitely be doing a chart on every person that came in because it would be helpful, but that's about all it can do.

Modern Astrology is very stripped down in terms of technique, the real problem with modern astrology is that it's trying to graft spiritual science onto this materialistic philosophy. And I was frustrated with that because I would read the stuff and it would seem pretty interesting but then get further into it and there didn't seem to be anything to it. Then I discovered Traditional Astrology, and Traditional Astrology is the Astrology practiced in Europe between 1200-1700. That was much more complex, based on traditional philosophy and is capable of making much more accurate predictions and has much more technique that was lost. I immediately could tell that's what I wanted to do so I started studying that and I had a number of teachers. I learned by correspondence which is essentially the only way to learn it because there's only a few people studying it or teaching it. Unless you happen to live right next door to them, you're not going to be able to find a teacher in your home town.

And then I developed the traditional astrology, and I got into astrological magic and that's kind of my own thing. I essentially had to rediscover that myself. Based on what's called electional astrology, which is choosing time to do things, like get married, you need to be able to know how to choose times for talismans in astrological magic.

Astrology has kind of taken over, and I joke that Law is my hobby.

How Long have you been practicing astrology?

I've been practicing for about 12 to 13 years.

And you were able to reintroduce astrological magic into the common era in that short period of time? I mean, if you do a search online looking for traditional astrology, your name is the first one that pops up.

Yeah, I have a strong web presence which can be a little misleading because there are people that are out there that are doing... first of all there are probably other people out there doing astrological magic that I don't know about, but in terms of the web, I just dominate that, but that's just because in the United States there's not as many professional horary astrologers.

For somebody who is just starting out, and thinks that astrology is a nifty little past time that they want to try to get into, what do you say?

That's fine. But the first question you want to ask is what do you want to get into, modern or traditional or even vedic. There's no more astrology than there is cooking - there's only different schools.

I'm pretty adamant with my students about the philosophy, it's something called their world view. World view is not just your conscious philosophy but its also your unconcsious views of reality - it IS your reality. With world view, we assume there's only one reality and that's our reality and how could there be anything else. So the idea that people in the past thought differently than us, well they were just wrong.

If you have a world view where magic is possible suddenly magic becomes possible. It's important that if you're going to practice Renaissance astrology or any spiritual art or discipline, if your doing it with your philosophy or reality that there is no spiritual realm which is the way most people think these days, its doomed to failure. And that's kind of the canker at the heart of this New Age spirituality and certainly Modern Astrology. It's that if you ask them how it works they can't tell you, or they'll say it's like gravity or sun spots or something which it's not. It's inherently non-sensical.

Since we do live in a very atheistic materialist society and people want empirical evidence that something works, do you have any particular chart that stands out in your mind that lends evidence to the fact that horary astrology does work?

You can't prove something that's impossible. It's scientifically impossible to prove astrology, because in science there is no spiritual realm, so there's no point in proving something that's impossible - so all that evidence would have to be rejected. There's no point in even having a discussion about it. Unless someone is willing to say, "Yeah the spiritual realm exists" - but to say to someone who's a staunch atheistic materialist whether it's conscious or unconscious "Well I can prove astrology" it's like they have to reject it, because they know that no matter what you say they have to say no, it can't work because right from the get go it's impossible. And they say that for extraordinary claims you have to have extraordinary proof. For something to suffice to prove that it's a scientific theorom wouldn't be enough for astrology because astrology is impossible.

How many charts do you think you've done in the 13 years that you've been practicing?

Horary, I'm probably getting up around 3,000 questions. Natal, maybe five, six or seven hundred - maybe closer to six hundred.

And it's funny because I get people who will argue with me and they've done maybe five charts, or they've done their own natal chart, or they read a book on horary - and I'm only now starting to get good at it. I think it takes about 2000 charts to start to get good at it.

The other thing too is that there's a big difference between trying to take a look at your own chart and taking a look at somebody else', because in order to ask a question you need to be emotionally removed from it.

Frivolous questions, or questions just out of curiousity don't work very well either.

So you need to be emotionally involved to ask the question, but you have to be clinically objective to answer it. And unless you're doing it professionally, it's hard to get the experience that you need to really get good at it.

Fin

That's really not the end of the interview, but there's just soooo much that I didn't have space for. And as promised I have a gift for anyone who posts on my blog.

Please visit Mr. Warnock's blog, read his posts and comment something worthwhile. After you've done this, come back and comment on my blog that you have indeed done it and I will e-mail you an e-book on traditional astrology that Mr. Warnock gave to me about a year ago.

Suggested Reading

7 Steps to Astrological Prediction: Part 2

After you ask the question, the next vital step is actually casting a chart.

Step 1 Ask the question

Step 2 Cast the chart

Step 3 Determine if chart is radical or fit to be judged

Step 4 Delineate the condition of each planet and luminary

Step 5 Determine primary significators

Step 6 Observe relations of significators

Step 7 If an outcome is determined, then predict the time it is determined for

It would seem like such a simple step, so simple in fact that people tend to do this before they even ask the question. But that's just plain silliness, and since we're real students we're not going to do that.

It is necessary to know the time, latitude and longitude of the question. When I say latitude and longitude, I mean what are the map coordinates of the astrologer at the time that the question is understood? My personal favorite is the ITouch Map. Simply plug in the city that you're looking for and the sexigesimal number for both latitude and longitude are calculated, as well as the actual minutes and seconds if you so prefer.

This is all fine and dandy, but how does this actually help with the chart? Now you need an ephemeris. I like Ephemeris.com. Now that you have the date, time, latitude and longitude, you can enter the necessary information into the appropriate fields and...Voila! The configuration of the planets at the time the question was asked, together with an "R" to signify whether or not the planet is retrograde. As a Traditional Astrologer, I only use the seven original planets and luminaries; Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. All other objects and locations listed in the ephemeris are really of no consequence. The other planets may be useful, but their use in predictive astrology is relatively young compared to the history of the art so there isn't enough information on how to properly use them yet.

So now we need to determine the houses. Most traditional Astrologers will use the Regiomontanus House System because that is what is described in Lilly's Christian Astrology. There are loads of systems that you can use. In Zoller's diploma course, he offers directions on how to calculate the houses using Dalton's tables - which I like but it's very labor intensive. However, for a beginner, and so that you don't go spending mad money on software while you learn, I would suggest visiting the Astrolabe website. They offer a free chart software that most likely uses the Placidus house system and it has a built in latitude/longitude finder.

All of these systems (and there are more) can vary slightly in house cusp degree making a huge difference in interpreting a chart, which is why it's nice to own software that can calculate the several house systems allowing you to compare the differences and come to a more thorough interpretation. For learning, it's worth it just to use the free software.

Recommended Reading:

Prediction

Please read this brief introduction if you are new to this blog before reading the following post.

Predictions are made every day, but as Robert Zoller points out in his Diploma Course, prediction is impossible without proper delineation.  So what does this mean and what predictions are we talking about?

The meteorologist studies atmospheric conditions and based on previous events, anticipated occurrences and details too laboring for the layman to research, s/he makes a mathematical prediction of when it will rain, snow or even when a hurricane will make landfall.  We all know that it's not an exact science, and the joke is quite consistent that the "weatherman" is always wrong.  Actually, meteorologists are pretty accurate 80%-90% of the time, but the few times that they're wrong give us the fuel to joke about their inadequacies.

The origins of the meteorologist actually stem from man's constant need to know what's coming.  For this, we have always looked to the stars.  The word meteorology comes from the Greek meteorologia, meaning "treatise on celestial phenomena".  Even in the Book of Genesis, we read that God put lights in the firmament and said "let them be for signs and for seasons", evidence that early man was dependant on celestial activity to predict events.

Traditional Astrology, including Horary, Natal, Mundane and many other branches, is no less a complicated matter or any less effective of a technique than modern meteorology.  Its only perceived folly is that it is antiquated in comparison to our moern understanding of the cosmos.  The Astrologer knows different, but the layman does not.

It is imperative that the novice, apprentice, and sometimes even the experienced astrologer understand and remember that "planetary rulership" does not necessarily mean that the planets empirically affect any person or object.  Instead, rulership is demonstrable evidence of the Hermetic adage "As Above, So Below".  For instance, our solar system is representative of cellular activity and molecular activity within us and all things.  The very simplest example is that of an atom, wherein we observe an electron orbiting the nucleus, just as the planets orbit the sun.  Before we understood the galaxy to be heliocentric, we still understood the planets and stars to orbit the earth - either way its the same concept as an atom.  So we observe the motion of the planets because that same motion is happening here on earth on a smaller scale.

To provide a working example of just how astrology works, imagine two solar systems, containing exactly the same shape and orbiting the planets but occupying two separate spaces and oriented in two different directions.  We'll call them S1 and S2.  S1 is horizontal meaning that the planets orbit the sun of S1 counterclockwise from left to right as we look at it.  S2 is vertical, where the planets orbit the sun counterclockwise up and down as we look at it.  As these two solar systems come within each others spaces, the planets orbiting them, and the gravity which each planet owns, affects those of the other.  When we have two people interacting with each other, we understand that the habits and personality traits affecting each of their decisions will also affect the reaction of the other.  As a hypnotist, I have had multiple opportunities to observe the motivations and habits of individuals as well as relationships and found this to be unequivocally true.

In order to properly predict when an event will occur, the Astrologer must take into account as many details of the circumstance as he can determine.  This process is called delineation.  Once he has accurately delineated all of these interactions, he can then mathematically calculate the time the outcome will culminate.

It should go without saying, but I'll mention it anyways, that the reason we look to the stars to determine these events is because of the scale.  The simple question is then asked, is it easier to observe the motion of the stars than it is to observe the motion of atoms? Obviously.

Suggested Reading:
John Frawley's The Real Astrology

John Frawley's The Real Astrology Applied

William Lilly's Christian Astrology

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