Astrological Cures through Herbs & Humors by Sharon Knight.
Diagnosis & prognosis of disease from Astrological charts have been in practice by ancient cultures for centuries.
From Hippocratic writings which refer to the physician’s skills in reading astrological charts to Hindu culture (jyotish), where every family physician had to have the patient’s chart along with a horary drawn up, ancient societies have understood that healing cures and astrology are inextricably linked.
The best known herbalist in the English speaking world, Culpeper was, like many doctors of his day, was also an expert astrologer and published a number of books on this subject including his “Opus Astrologicum” (1654) and his “Astrological Judgment of Diseases” (1655).
Sharon Knight will bring alive the ancient remedial herbal cures, widely prevalent in the Greco-Arabic period with modern twist.
She has over 18 years experience as a traditional Astrologer and a specialization in Phytotherapy (Modern Herbal medicine).
Sharon: hello i’m sharon knight i’m a Q.H.P i’ve got a M.A. from Bath in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology and i’m the chair of the association of professional astrologers international, i said i’m a Q.H.P, i’m a traditional astrologer with a medieval classical background and i’ve got interest in mundane financial horary of course and herbalism.
Enid: so would you like to tell us how you got into astrology originally?
Sharon: when i was 16 that christmas i was given linda goodman sun sign astrology and i learnt that book from cover to cover and i thought that’s what astrology was and for many years i’d go to parties and i’d say ‘you’re a pisces you’ve got bad feet you’re a sagitarrius you (?) like this’ and that was great and indeed i got lots of drinks had good times with that level of astrology. turn time 29 i was lucky i was living in london and we still had the adult education classes going, my first mentor was mike edwards, brilliant mike edwards and then bernard (?) of course he was also teacher basically i just (?) myself with astrology. i started with the faculty, completed my intermediate diploma, was at summer school, that was prior to taking the full diploma and i was sitting chatting with ron (?) (..?) and i said to him ‘this isn’t doing it for me, this isn’t what i thought astrology was about, its not predictive, its not specific its so wishy-washy’ and ron (?) at me ‘my dear, you need olivia’ he gave me olivia (?) phone number, when i went back home i rang her immediately and she said she would take me on and i was lucky enough i would go down and spend time with her in her cottage and talk, i took the Q.H.P and passed relatively quickly and through olivia her insistence on us supporting project hindsight, this is in 89-90 so put up (?…?) stuff so i had a lot of these medieval texts that were being translated that were first coming in to a select few in the astrological world because at that time, it was liz greene (?..?) and union of psychological astrology and traditional astrology was very much the minority and very much looked down upon in those days because of the predictive element, because if you are an astrologer, you do not make predictions but if you’re a traditional astrologer you only make predictions. but now the two areas have meld sort of come together there’s a lot more acknowledgment of exactly what traditional astrology can do and indeed that’s what i’m hoping to do today. one of the most important which lot of astrologers don’t take into account is: is it a diurnal or nocturnal chart, which leads on to sect, so in 91 i gave a talk at the lodge – the history talk on sect and people didn’t know, i mean you do know
Enid: when was that
Sharon: that was i think 91, quite long ago, i was into sect .. i’ve got first house saturn, i like the history i like the tradition, i like having rules to follow and if you follow the rules and learn the rules, you follow the rules, you know when you can bend the rules, its a very easy driving manual for life
Enid: .. traditional rulers but outer planets are secondary rulers or (?)
(eclipses in taurus in 2013)
sharon: in mundane i look at the outers but in mundane i still work predominantly with the jupiter-saturn conjunctions. that’s what works, its what’s working for cyprus and a lot of the (?) stuff it is the jupiter saturn conjunctions and the last one happened in 2000 in taurus 22 degrees so this coming eclipse in 19 degrees and the one in november its the powerhouse i think when mars goes over 19 22 degrees of taurus as it will do fairly shortly with this coming eclipse we’ll see some action in the mundane world. that’s how they predicted it, they predicted it on the eclipses, they predicted on the jupiter-saturn cycles and the great mutations. so with the outer planets there’s no doubt that you can correlate mass events with the outer planets but its mass events they’re generational. also with the ancients they looked at the phases of the planets so if you had venus rising before the sun, and the easiest way for people to look at that is that you put the sun just below the ascendant and you see is venus on the ascendant or is she going to come up after the sun, if she’s on the ascendant she’s rising before the sun as we see it on the flat bit of paper and traditionally she was known as ishta the warrior-queen she incited war, she was quite a different venus to the one that came behind the king going ‘i’m pretty i’m beautiful i love music i love art’ quite a different (character?) and traditionally they were known as the spear bearers the planets either side of the sun and the moon were known as spear bearers and they would go in front and tell people to make way for the king or queen and then they’d come behind gathering up all the flowers. .. with the humors which is shortly what i’ll be coming on to, humors you had the basic four types jung had his archetypes four archetypes it all comes from traditional astrology but it was lost, it was lost probably from alan leo more acceptable after his court case, i think that’s when the rot set in, and of course they didn’t have available the works we have today
(on culpeper)
Enid: .. on culpeper
Sharon: i love culpeper laugh my socks off because he is so funny. now herbalism is the forerunner of pharmaceutical, chemical medicine that we have today. everybody healthy if you became ill then they would say we need this herb that herb if you had a phlegmatic illness, as i have now, i’ve got a sore throat and a cold, an excess of phlegm so i need hot drying foods, so they’d look at the age of the person and the sex of the person and prescribe accordingly, so if i were an old man and i was present with rheumatism or a severe cold, not just like this thing, they’d prescribe a rooster because its a hot dry bird, it would dry out the excess of the cold wet (?)
enid: what form would you be prescribed rooster?
sharon: probably a live one you’d probably sweat out the cold running around tracing the rooster. so it goes back to hippocrates and we have to again remember that these are the earliest written records we have
(inspirational books and authors)
enid: astrologers you’d recommend and any particular text
sharon: barbara dunn she’s written the definitive horary astrology textbook but it is very dense and you have to be dedicated to read and work through it. john frawley he doesn’t often speak about it he too was taught by olivia and mike edwards, cause he and i were in classes together, but john frawley’s books are brilliant because they’re witty they’re laughable and i think people learn more through laughing. lee leighman, her book on rulerships she wrote a book quite a few years ago ‘traditional astrology and modern living’ that’s quite good, there are some good textbooks – joseph crane has written a simple primer, with few errors in it – but that’s a very good book
(ptolemy)
sharon: how can i say so much without mentioning ptolemy, his book is straightforward simple astrology and there is a psychology in it but you’ve got to know to pick it up
enid: that will be very interesting because i’ve never heard anyone say psychology in the same sentence as traditional
(humoral types stretches to ancient times)
sharon: shakespeare the melancholic, the choleric characters were part and parcel of elizabethan plays and hamlet, he had know beard, he had thin hair, he stooped he shuffled he had no energy he gave up physical exercise, typical melancholic everybody in the audience would have known he had a surfeit of melancholia and same with shylock the jew melancholia comes under saturn as it were but we’ll come to that later, jews come under saturn because its the traditional religion, dark invariably dark, they look down, they have their hands behind their back, they go woe is me, but actually the melancholics are the most intelligent
(prescriptions according to humors)
enid: prescriptions you would give for melancholia surely if
sharon: hot and wet, you’d give a sanguine food because a melancholic is cold and dry so if you wanted to lift them up you’d give them sanguine and air and it would be hot and moist. in vedic medicine as it were it is recognized by world health authority, it has been remained unchanged for over 3000 years and it works. the pharmaceutical industry has done its come along and isolated the various components of plants, the seeds, the roots, whatever and found its got this chemical that mineral and they’ve then taken and synthesized it. now the thing is a lot of people will go and buy magnesium tablets for their nails and hair, magnesium is found in brazil nuts, the problem is the dna of the helix as it were inside the synthetically produced magnesium is the wrong way, it goes the opposite way as brazil nuts so our bodies can’t really absorb, so a lot of these supplements that people buy, i mean they really don’t do a lot of good because they’re synthetically produced. the chickens today have sort of like 50-60% less nutritional value than 40-50 years ago so it has all to do with the soil, it all comes back to the gaia theory which comes back to ‘as above so below’ which comes back to traditional astrology because in traditional astrology ‘as above so below’ is what you can see with the naked eye and that’s why the outer planets, that you can’t see with the naked eye, don’t really have a place in traditional astrology.
(work & website)
sharon: i do workshops in conjunction with robin ray in sussex, we run a monthly workshop together, i have a website www.astrologysharon.co.uk and my email is astrologysharon@yahoo.com