From Astrology to Homeopathy and Back

An invitation to share in my (no longer) unlived parallel life, share what you know, and learn how to take care of yourself and your family.

A page from Prisma by Frans Vermeulen

Dear Friend and Reader:

A few times recently, I’ve heard myself tell friends that I have an unlived parallel life as a practicing homeopath. However, my currently existing parallel lives of investigative reporter and astrologer have made that difficult to develop.

Yet I’ve continuously maintained both my interest in homeopathy (and my library and my remedy collection, with occasional prescribing). I have benefited greatly from the ways that homeopathy has informed my work in both the health/science fields I cover, and in astrology.

My whole astrological method is homeopathic. I found out about homeopathy a year into my astrology career, and from its methods, learned about how to work with clients, and how to think of the effects of a reading.

The natal chart is a homeopathic device. Its pattern is your constitutional remedy. And in a homeopathic consultation, the most important thing that the practitioner does is get the client talking about their particular human condition. I had already adopted that approach; homeopathy helped me refine my method.

This is one of several examples of how the best information I got about how to practice astrology came from outside the astrological field. (This includes writing clearly, which I learned from covering many other complicated technical subjects.)

This giant camphor tree with its canopy in the shape of a perfect mushroom is a monument of sorts in Yanxi, Jiangxi. Standing at the side of a road, plantations around it appear to be dwarfed in comparison.

In 2020, Looking for the Genus Epidemicus

When the 2020 crisis broke out, one of the reasons I was not meekly worried was because I know the history of homeopathy and epidemics. In two words, no problem.

Even assuming an outbreak, homeopathy can handle minor issues like the one that was being described in the “covid” scenario: essentially, flu-like symptoms. Then as the crisis broadened (in society), my first clue that there was actually nothing going on was that none of the leaders of the homeopathic community could come up with the definitive genus epidemicus — the remedy for the whole epidemic.

The minute I heard the word “pandemic,” I started looking around for theories.

When the remedy Camphora was briefly proposed, was I the only one who got the joke? Camphora is a flu remedy; and it’s also the antidote to other remedies. However, upon thorough scientific and statistical investigation, there was no epidemic except for terror and nosocomial death induced in hospitals. I have yet to hear of anyone who “died of covid” outside a hospital or nursing facility.

So no distinct epidemic of a single illness means no genus epidemicus. Where the illness is consistent and distinct, there will be a remedy.

My desk during the “covid” homeopathic investigation, April 2020. Homeopathy requires the use of BOOKS in my opinion, from classical sources, that you understand how to use. Cursory internet searches are dangerous until you know what you’re doing.

Influenza Remedies Address Fear

Soon into the crisis, I wrote an article explaining how all the remedies that address influenza also address fear.

I want to say that again: flu remedies all address fear. I cover that in this article from April 2020 that you may remember called The Private Idaho Virus. This is to say that the flu and fear are closely related, which we watched unfold in hideous, slow-motion detail. The “pandenic” was one of panic.

If you don’t think that “covid” was “the flu,” consider that the first entry in the 2021 chronology was the CDC admitting that influenza cases had somehow gone down by 98% during 2020. Yes, influenza had mysteriously cured itself during the “covid pandemic” just like that, after vexing civilization since it was first designated in 1743!

You really must have a need to believe this shit to fall for it, or be a lot stupider than you’re willing to admit. (In October 2019, Fauci specifically promised to rebrand the flu to make it more frightening — but who knew? If you want to hear that PWFM episode, leave a note in the comments. It’s one of the best.)

A sponge living in the Mediterranean Sea.

Skip Ahead to Monday Night: Spongia Tosta

Monday was my first day of audio production on The Awakening. I was underway but feeling a little under the weather. By Monday night I had developed a dry, stabbing, shallow cough. The weather got dry and cold very fast here in upstate New York this week, and that also meant artificial heat with its brittle, poor quality air.

Note, I did not for one millisecond think that I had “caught something.” I knew my body was responding to a combination of many long weeks of work, and the sudden shift in the environment. Try to get that notion of a “bug” out of your mind and it will be easier to help yourself work through issues.

Cough carries the risk of becoming habitual (and doing throat damage), which makes it difficult to speak for an hour straight, or at all. So too does shallow breathing. (I was trained into the voice that I have today when I was about 12 by a laryngologist named Dr. Friedrich Brodnitz. He taught me how to open my larynx using vocal exercises and how to resonate from my chest rather than my throat when speaking.)

So I started looking up cough remedies, and the one that seemed to match was Spongia tosta (potentized burnt sea sponge) — the key was the painful stab contained in the cough. Think of the parallel between lung tissue that feels dry and brittle, and dry, brittle sponge.

Homeopathy is always specific. I bet 20 or more common remedies contain “cough.” The question is, what kind? I have several remedy sets and a collection of weird ones, and it was easy to find Spongia tosta. Well, one dose and the cough stopped being painful, just like that. Later in the week, I used Spongia to address a kind of rattling (or sawing) asthma that had developed, at night, when laying down.

Raw coffee beans.

And to Tuesday Night: Coffea Cruda

Then suddenly I had insomnia. Oh god. The way I’ve organized my life for the past week was to do two readings a day, which takes about three hours — and with a few exceptions, to do nothing else. All I needed to do was sleep and eat a little and I would be fine. But I felt like I had drunk a triple espresso before going to bed despite having no coffee whatsoever.

The remedy for this state of mind is none other than potentized raw coffee, called Coffea cruda. After some hours of wriggling around in bed listening to Brian Eno, I got out my remedy collections again. I keep them in a dark, weird little room at the back of my apartment, which they share with some guitars, my suits and old camera gear.

Now imagine me on my couch at 3 am going through bin after bin of remedies looking for Coffea, not finding it anywhere. Not in first aid kit type collections where it belonged, and not in bigger remedy sets — and I was not going to pull out my box with the odd ones like cocaine, peyote, brown recluse spider and dolphin milk.

However, I kept reaching into my remedy kits and jars and finding Glonoinum.

Yes, I would pick up a vial and it would say, Glonoinum 30, or Glonoinum 200, or Glonoinum 1M, and then they would repeat. It was like a weird dream. Why on Earth did I have all these potencies of homeopathic dynamite? Actual potentized TNT, a remedy good for heat stroke and migraines? I may have ordered them one week when a couple of people complained to me of bad headaches, but I don’t remember when.

(Usually when I call the lab for a remedy, I get several potencies; the shipping costs as much as the medicine, so it’s worth it to have options.)

I somehow managed to get to sleep, and in the morning the Coffea turned up in my little remedy jar from the “covid” era. And — it helped greatly. I experienced a gentle, light kind of sleep that I had not felt in weeks. By this time I had switched from listening to Eno’s Music for Airports to homeopathic lectures. And I started finding some really good ones.

The shelves on the far right contain my homeopathy and medical collection, though you can’t see much of it. Astrology is to the left. Photo by Lanvi Nguyen.

Which Leads to the Point of this Letter

This morning, I’m here to propose getting a discussion about homeopathy going among Planet Waves readers. I do not want to start another Substack so this would be a series of posts to this Substack, which would serve as open discussion forums. Professionals, amateurs (some of whom are extremely talented) and newcomers are welcome. We can start the discussion here with personal homeopathy stories.

To work with this method, one must to be intuitive, possess technical knowledge, and listen to one’s body. You must also be patient. Because I could do that, I got through the week, did my work, and am feeling fine on Saturday evening (when I wrote this).

If you start to get the hang of taking care of yourself (and others) this way, and make some friends with some knowledge, and take a minimalist approach, you have a lot of creative freedom for how to think of your health situations and those of your family.

But this is not like swilling down some Robitussin and two Tylenol. At no point are you “drugged.” That is the beauty of this method: you get away from dependency on those chemicals without having to become a wildcrafting herbalist shaman. The remedies are inexpensive and commonly avaialble.

It’s important to be aware of the differences between classical homeopathy and the kind of acute care I’ve described in this article. Even acute care can be informed by principles of classical or constitutional homeopathy. One important crossover point is always keeping an ear open for the emotional and mental states and the peculiarities associated with a physical ailment.

Books are disappearing from astrology. This is not a good development.

Homeopathy is About Depth of Understanding — and Results

I believe that astrology has a lot to learn from homeopathy’s discipline, self-respect and respect for tradition. There is no comparison in the overall quality of the books or the consistency of practice. Most of astrology is merely winging it.

In the homeopathic profession, someone cannot come along and declare themselves a great homeopath and be taken seriously by their colleagues. They must have something to offer. Homeopathy is about depth of understanding, applying that knowledge, and ultimately, the results that it gets.

Homeopathy is also about the harm that it does not do. From this, astrology must take a lesson. Such is rarely a consideration.

Astrology as practiced in nearly all digital life tends to lack coherent purpose, and it really needs one. Few people grasp what it’s for, or know what to do with it.

Homeopathy can help astrology in all regards — especially purpose.

When you’re assisting a kid with a bee sting, or a friend with a sprained ankle or menstrual issues, or helping someone with severe anxiety over a nonexistent pandemic, then you have a purpose. And you know what it means to fulfill that purpose.

Seeing Through the Chaos of Society

In my view, astrology’s purpose in our time is to help us see through the chaos of society and offer a look into an underlying implicit order: something closer to cause rather than effect. Astrology is about studying the passage of time when it seems that time has spun out of control.

It is about getting a clue to meaning in an era when everything seems meaningless. These are not casual topics, though these days, a little meaning has the benefit of offering a point of rest and receptiveness. This is an inner state; a place of inner understanding where you can go beyond being deceived by external factors and tune into yourself.

To help with that, I found a moving lecture Friday, posted below, by one of the modern masters, George Vithoulkas. Listen in a quiet moment, such as before you go to sleep; watching is not necessary. It progresses very slowly, is soft-spoken and lasts one hour.

Jai Ganesha! Please add your comments below.

With love,

Your faithful astrologer,