A well-meaning friend recently sent me an astrological article on the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. The article features an event chart for the time of the plane’s takeoff in Kuala Lumpur, and attempts to correlate testimonies within the chart to the plane’s mysterious fate.
Receipt of this article was timely in light of my teacher’s Facebook post questioning the appropriateness of public astrological speculation about the tragedy (https://www.facebook.com/johnfrawleyfanpage/posts/10152127724972886). I agree with him that public discussion of the tragedy is not helpful for the real people whose lives have been shattered by it. What I want to address here, just briefly for a start, is the question of whether event charts have any validity in the way that most astrologers assume.
Here's the thing: An event chart set for Kuala Lumpur, for Flight 370's lift-off, does not 'belong' to that flight alone, if indeed it belongs to the flight at all. It is a transit, a snapshot of a moment in time during which countless other events also took place. Other flights took off from the same airport, for example, shortly before and after the fated flight. Charts for those flights would be nearly identical, yet they did not also go missing. Any number of other things, along the full range of good to bad, happened at that time, in that location, for the millions of people living there. Why do we think that this transit chart relates only, or especially, to Flight 370?
Then there's the problem of who gets assigned what house in an event chart. In the case of Flight 370, for example: Who gets assigned what house in this chart? Is the plane itself the first house, as the “me” of the chart? Or is the flight the 9th, because it is long-distance travel? Or is it the 3rd, because it is a routine flight (as many are, being repeated daily between two locations)? What house represents the people on the flight, vs. the attendants, or the pilot and his crew?
It's problematic, isn't it? There’s no way to be sure what house represents what in an event chart. One could argue several different possibilities with some measure of reason.
Here's the crux of the matter: Does an event, such as an airplane flight, merit a ‘birth’ chart in the way that a human being does? If a natal chart is valid, why not the chart for a flight?
The natal chart is valid because humans are the crown of creation. Some may not like this assertion, as it seems to hold us above all else in the created universe. But it is the essential truth. All human activities, airplane travel included, are subordinate things compared to the human being himself. Events do not have lives in the way we do.
So when an astrologer interprets an event chart, he's reading meanings into the chart that aren’t really there. It’s essentially creative writing based on an understanding of the symbols of astrology—just as the sun-sign columns are the creative writings of journalists. Such creative writing does not advance the cause of bringing astrology back into a position of respect and importance in the modern world.
Above Photo: By Laurent ERRERA from L'Union, France - Boeing 777-200ER Malaysia AL (MAS) 9M-MRO - MSN 28420/404, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29838624