Casting Your Chart of Origin
Casting your Chart of Origin is rather simple. Clear your mind of expectations and desires and focus on your intention to be open to whatever guidance you receive. Take several deep breaths to clear your mind. Your archetypes will be guided into their appropriate houses by the energy of simultaneity, coincidence, spiritual order, divine paradox, and destiny, through much the same magnetic organizational process that guides any tool that communicates with your intuition. It is important to clear your mind prior to casting your Chart, so that guidance can come through unimpeded. You may use this meditation as a centering device, or substitute one of your own:
Close your eyes and breathe deeply into your abdomen, allowing your stomach to expand as you breathe in and contract as you exhale. See yourself as a hollow reed or membrane, expanding and contracting. Continue in slow, deep breaths repeating, “I have no desires. I have no thoughts. I am empty of all disturbances. I am empty of all my needs. I am open to receive.”
There are four steps to casting your Chart of Origin. After you have centered yourself through meditation, proceed as follows:
Step 1: Preparation
Cut out 24 pieces of paper about two inches by three inches. On each of 12 slips, write the name of one of your 12 archetypes. On the other 12 slips write the numbers one through twelve, one number on each slip of paper. Place the archetypes and the numbers in two different stacks, face down.
Step 2: Intuitive Focus
After centering yourself again, or using the longer meditation in “Sacred Contracts,” shuffle the two stacks of paper, being careful to keep them separate. As you shuffle the stack of archetypes, ask, “In which houses do these archetypes best serve me?” Your intention creates a magnetic circuit that will direct the archetypes to their appropriate houses as you work with them in Step 3.
Step 3: Intuitive Choice
Picture yourself as a “hollow reed” transmitting energy. Keeping the slips of paper face down, choose one from each pile: a number and an archetype. The numbers correspond to the house into which that archetype should go. Write the name of that archetype into the numbered house on your Wheel. If you chose the number five and the Child cards, for example, your Child archetype belongs in the fifth house of your Wheel. Continue this exercise until all 12 houses are filled.
Step Four: The Partnerships of Archetypes and their Houses
This final step is considerably more complex than what has preceded, and I recommend that you consult “Sacred Contracts” for a detailed description of how to proceed. Once you have paired the archetypes with their houses, you have generated a unique energy field that represents the symbolic hologram of your unconscious. In brief, you will again ask yourself a series of questions (which appear in Chapter 8 of my book) to determine the deeper significance and the many ramifications of these pairings.
You might begin exploring the meaning of each archetype-to-house partnership, for example, by listing any immediate associations and thoughts that occur to you. Even if you feel resistance to some of the partnerships, don’t suppress any responses that come to you. You are learning a new, multi-dimensional way of perceiving your life, and it may feel awkward at first. For instance, say you matched the Prostitute to your seventh house. You might write: “My Prostitute archetype is in the house of relationships. This means that the fears that cause me to sell myself to the highest bidder generally have more to do with my relationships than with my professional life. I don’t tend to sell out in business dealings, because I have a strong sense of self-esteem in that realm. Yet my fear of rejection leads me to cling compulsively to relationships that don’t serve my spiritual needs.”
As you practice symbolic sight, you’ll learn to evaluate the significance of each pairing. If, for instance, the Victim archetype fell in the house of relationships instead, it would urge you to examine your relationships with your family members, spouse, business partner, children, and friends, and be on guard for ways in which you have allowed yourself to be victimized. You would then look for alternative ways in which to transform the Victim within so that you might have a healthier relationship. Work your way around your Chart of Origin, one house at a time. As you go you will learn more about your tendencies, strengths, and weaknesses.
Because your Chart of Origin is like a natal astrology chart, you cast it only once. But after you’ve spent time exploring the basic relationships of your archetypes to the houses into which they fall, you’re ready to use a similar technique to obtain guidance in a variety of specific situations by casting what I call “working charts.”
