Astrology Synesthesia
My party trick: Why I might not remember your name but I wont forget your big three.
I have never had a great memory for names or historical dates. I learn through visual and active engagement, and growing up I struggled with certain learning difficulties that made traditional education taxing. Often unless I saw something displayed in person with a memorable context, or made a concerted effort to cement the information in my mind, it seemed to slip past me and straight into the void. Some might call it ADHD; as an astrologer I’ll call it Neptunian. Until I learned to drive myself and was forced to actually make note of my surroundings, you might have dropped me off a few minutes from home and I could have wandered the streets completely perplexed (pre google maps), which to my bemusement did happen once or twice. If you told me your name perhaps I’d smile politely, already having forgotten it. I had an incredibly rich inner world and a love of drawing, creating fabulous and complex scenarios in my mind; math class was spent sketching elaborate marginalia in my journal, and my attention span for numbers lasted short, panicked minutes at best.
For all my “absentmindedness” something strange happened when I started learning about astrology and associating signs with months, months with decans, decans with days. I started remembering dates. And associations with dates. And oh, the numbers! Numbers started connecting, becoming not only symbolically reciprocal, but spiritually buzzing with intention and recognition. I found myself remembering people’s signs with relative ease, singularly because the sign connected the personality with my tangible experience, and the experience led me back to the sign, the date, the data.
Like a goldfish, I often filter out daily mundane information- where I parked at the grocery store may elude me, but of course I still easily recall my 7th grade math teacher’s sign almost twenty years later. And anyone else who has told me their sign. And most people that I look up on Wikipedia. And probably your dog’s sign as well. My brain doesn’t seem to sieve the astrological information out; it collects birthdays like a pond with no filtration system. Filled with gigantic, glistening goldfish. The pond expanded when I began to learn about moon signs, which I could look up (mostly) without knowing one’s time of birth. All of a sudden people became not just one astrological category, but multidimensional.
The data began to feel musical and alive, like a kind of alchemy. And the alchemy had another element to it: Synesthesia.
I vaguely and unintentionally associate colors with numbers, words, and shapes; Friday is always sleek black like a young feral cat, Sunday a nebulous gray, dense and weighty. Wednesday is orange juice with pulp and some fizz. Thursday is a velvety, chocolate brown with hints of aubergine. I have a similar experience with the zodiac signs. If someone says they are a Capricorn, I instantly see them as deep, resonant blue. Cancer is a salt lamp pink, Pisces always shimmery white to silver. If I close my eyes the colors have certain expressions, shapes, flavors. It gives their placements a rhythm, a pattern. Often when I think about a person I assume a flash of the “color” that naturally associates in my brain along with their sun and moon sign. To me the “sign” is the essence, the flavor that creates memory and association.
Guess Work
I often guess people’s sign, sun or moon, based on the “flavor” they exude energetically. If I meet one person with a distinct energy, I’ll note it in someone else, and often find they share a sign in their big 3. The water signs are easiest for me to spot. Have you ever noticed how Piscean ruled people have distinctly beautiful, watery eyes? (This is a cliche but one I’ve found to almost always hold up.) Pisces have the most dreamy, soulful expression, often slightly pained and heavy lidded. Scorpio’s have a distinctly “Plutonian” feeling to them. A type of speech or intensity that radiates though their body and gives them a nervy, buzzing physicality like an arrow ready to be released. I recently guessed a man’s sign at a dinner party because he reminded me of a rockstar I used to love. It turned out they had the same birthday. Because he was a Scorpio, he was both impressed and highly suspicious by my “guessing his secret.” Cancers are a little trickier because they often have a guarded quality and because they are moon ruled, their energy is constantly changing with the tides. But most Cancer’s I know have a secret wryness, a dry humor and nettle-like sting that runs alongside their natural charismatic warmth.
It takes practice, but over time you’ll notice how the characteristics of someone’s big three blend together to give them a signature energy, an ebb and flow in expression. An Aquarius with a Pisces rising exudes a very different kind of energy than an Aquarius with a Scorpio rising. Remember also the modalities we are dealing with, even if the signs are of the same element. Pisces and Scorpio are both water, both highly intuitive and sensitive, but an Aquarius sun (fixed) with a Pisces rising (mutable) is given far more fluidity and ambiguity to work with than an Aquarius (fixed) sun with a Scorpio (fixed) rising. Here, (double fixed) we’re comparing the energy of someone who is significantly set in their direction and uses this water energy to make a path by eroding the stone rather than flowing in all directions.
I am an Aries sun, Aries rising and Cancer moon. I am a yellowy, orangey red that is mostly spreading out and bouncing off of things. A Libra sun, Libra moon, Virgo rising is a soft, lilac base with a sharp, defining pink hat like a flamingo (the virgo rising gives sharpness to libra’s roundness.) a Sagittarius sun with a Pisces moon is gem-like, a very rich spread of lapis or royal blue bouncing off the reflective silver of a Pisces moon. A Scorpio with a Leo moon might be a deep burgundy with a proud, gaudy red, the two colors absorbing and consuming one another, whereas a Scorpio sun with a Gemini moon would be a chocolate brown with a bright, emerald green. The signs transform as they converse and absorb one another.
My Zodiac Synesthesia Guide:
Aries: Fiery vermillion like a yoke, bright, insistent, violent. quick to flair and quick to retreat.
Taurus: a reddish oaky brown, like warm earth turned up in summer, like the inside of a wine bottle, the smell of cork floors.
Gemini: Multicolored like a fish - green and yellow, then yellow and green, sometimes a flash of blue, like the rainbow fish from the children’s book, but slinky and flighty and glamorous like a salamander.
Cancer: versatile in substance but mostly a salt lamp or peony pink; fleshy, glowing like an orb, ready to consume. Very round with solid edges. Sometimes blushing a deeper color closer to fire, sometimes slippery and pale like a salmon.
Leo: A deep, yam red with no edges, expansive, pulsing, warm, steady, an apple that bruises easily.
Virgo: dangerously pastel; a pale pink, a baby yellow, many points like a star, each point sharp and able to spear, but also refined, the spear is the arrow that directs, that knows where it’s going.
Libra: periwinkle. draping, soft and carpeted. The finest of material. Linen? Softer? Something else. A room with many windows in the dusky evening, the smell of crushed lilac, lake water.
Scorpio: onyx with reflective specs of red. Like a stone, both burnished and matte, impenetrable, the color black in the summer pulling in more heat to the body, a seal in water.
Sagittarius: Royal blue, pinstripe. No beginning or end. No side to side, no boundaries, always expanding, not big and solid like a Capricorn but like sea turning down to space until it’s up. Ships far out with nothing in sight but water.
Capricorn: Navy blue, round, large and weighty like a heavy cap with a plume or a distinguished velvet cloak weighing on the heart and shoulders.
Aquarius: Almost colorless, but near to burlap or mossy oak. See-through like a delicate bug. A spirolic circle, diffuse, with no beginning or end.
Pisces: Shimmery, brightly pale and opaque or silvery, reflective like the moon on water, it shimmers into darkness then reappears, shimmers then reappears, over and over again.
Let me know what you see, how you feel. When you picture friends, loved ones, adversaries, do the signs have a shape, a texture? Does one Gemini you know feel drastically different than another based on their moon sign? Do you know two people with the same moon sign who may be completely contrary but give off a similar energy or feeling? Try it for yourself. Let astrology be a musical and intuitive language as well as a technical one. Enter the pond.
So delightful and inspiring