In these times of uncertainty, some Ukrainians are turning to astrology to find out what the future holds
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Take Kyrylo Bondar, a realist if there ever was one. Bondar is a programmer who concentrates on computers, one of the most technical and typically down-to-earth fields there is going.
“I’m a rational person and trust something only when I see how it works,” Bondar confirms.
Still, Bondar also admits that every time his aunt spreads out a deck of her homemade Tarot cards, she is able to tell him something that had either happened in his life or that ends up happening to him in the not-too-distant future. And that’s a phenomenon that has left him scratching his head.
“Maybe it’s a tendency of the human mind to notice coincidences and to forget about those predictions that haven’t been fulfilled,” Bondar commented. “Otherwise there’s no logical explanation for it.”
Alas, since Bondar can’t detect any logic in his aunt’s uncanny capacity to hit the nail on the head, he ultimately rejected hearing any more of her fortunes.
A matter of life and death
But where our computer programmer remains skeptical, many others remain more than eager to dabble in the unknown and peer into their future. The reasons for their interest in the future range from the spiritual to the morbid.
“The most frequently asked question people want to know the answer to is the date of their death,” said Iryna Rudenko, a clairvoyant who works at the Nostradamus Salon is Kyiv. “The second popular question is ‘What is my mission in life?’”
Their code of ethics forbids Rudenko and her colleagues to provide clients with information concerning their deaths. But she says she can tell you just what you were in your former life – or lives.
Amid the turbulence and uncertainty of post-Soviet Ukraine, the popularity of services specializing in solving people’s problems using untraditional methods is growing, practitioners say.
Nostradamus is one of the capital’s most reputable salons and employs four specialists reputedly graced with the gift of clairvoyance. Its clients are typically people despondent over a problem or situation they can’t fully comprehend or solve on their own. Often, Nostradamus clairvoyants say, these problems result from bad deeds committed in former lives, or as the result of curses placed on them by others. Nostradamus rights these wrongs by purifying clients’ energy in order to help them reach a special state of mind.
“There is nothing new in what we do,” said Halyna Chaika, another Nostradamus clairvoyant. “Since antiquity, millenniums before the appearance of modern science, mankind has been developing dozens of techniques to carry out these conversions.”
Star struck
Many of those techniques remain popular today. Tarot cards, for instance, originated in Egypt, where they were initially carved on giant temple stones. I Ching is an ancient Chinese technique of reading the future. It involves throwing three coins and interpreting the resulting combinations. Romany people, or Gypsies, have long been famous (or infamous) for their palm reading. And even Ukrainian village sorcerers used to tell fortunes by looking at reflections in water.
But of all these methods, the most elaborate, most logical and most appealing to the modern, rational person is astrology: the language of stars.
“Astrology is just as immense a multilateral science as medicine or law,” argued astrologer Oleksandr Yasynsky of the Pavel Globa Astrological Research Center. “To accumulate all the statistics by which astrology operates would require 20,000 years of data processing.”
For the earliest example of a horoscope – an astrological forecast, as of a person’s future, based on a diagram of the aspect of the planets and stars at a given moment – Egypt also offers a contender: from 410 B.C. But it was at archaeological excavations in Siberia’s Altai mountains where, according to Yasynsky, solar calendars carved on bones and dating back some 24,000 years were discovered.
Astrology has many subdivisions, including studying the influence of the stars on everything from history to the weather. But the most popular aspect of astrology for individuals tends to be, naturally, that which focuses on the individual.
People come to astrologers to find out how to solve their health problems, deal with disobedient children or check on how compatible they are for a prospective mate. Business people have even been known to turn to astrologers to find out when to register a company or whether they can trust their partners. There’s no getting away from the power of the planets.
“A person is born with a certain horoscope, and it’s like a stamp in a passport – for their whole life,” said astrologer Andry Hubernator.
Astrology claims that each person’s life is influenced by the stars that were active in the moment the person was born.
“Each celestial body has a gravitational field, which influences all living things on Earth,” Yasynsky explained. “The most obvious influence are the tides, affected by the waxing or waning moon, but other celestial bodies further from Earth nevertheless have their effects, too.”
Astrologers use a simplified version of the celestial map to distinguish 12 constellations – called signs of the zodiac – 12 celestial bodies (or planets) and 12 sectors of the sky (or houses). During the period of one year – the time it takes for the Earth to orbit the sun – the Sun goes through all the zodiacal signs. The sun therefore plays the biggest role among the stars, and an individual’s zodiac sign is based on the position of the sun at the moment of birth. That sign defines all the individual’s character traits.
“The sign answers the question ‘what,’ the planet tells us ‘how’ and the house tells us which ‘area’ an action will take place,” Hubernator explained.
For instance, to an astrologer the mystic combination “the moon in Sagittarius in the fifth house” reveals that an individual possesses acute perception and pays attention to original and unusual things, especially in the area of fine arts. Such a person is most likely to be connoisseur of avant-garde theater, Hubernator said.
The combinations of planet positions for each hour of each year are shown in tables called Ephemeris. To look up your star combination in the Ephemeris, the astrologer needs to know your exact birth time, down to the minute. Hubernator said that your time of birth can be calculated with a special formula, using the date of your first marriage, which signifies the change of your social status. If you haven’t been married, more complex calculations, involving the turning points of your life, can be used.
Once that’s settled, the astrologer uses the Ephemeris tables, which contain information on where the planets are at any given time, to construct a circular chart. The chart reveals “aspects” – which planets are positioned across from each other at given times.
“If the planet in a sign reveals the reason for a certain event, its aspect shows the consequence,” Hubernator said. “This is already a model of certain events that can occur in a person’s life.”
To illustrate the theory, the astrologer presented the horoscope of a young woman, which indicated that her father’s tendency to try to control her friends may later lead to problems with her choosing her sexual partners – because of lack of trust that’s been built up.
Shedding some star light
The most difficult part of completing a horoscope lies in the interpretation. The attention an astrologer pays to interpreting your horoscope is usually indicative of whether he is really trying to help you or is simply out for commercial gain.
Technology can help. With the help of special software, creating a chart can take as little as five minutes – but the interpretation itself can still take days to complete. And then the astrologer still faces the moral dilemma of what to disclose to the client and what to pass over in silence. Most astrologers do not disclose negative events.
“You can foretell anything about a person and it will happen to him – it’s simple programming,” Hubernator said. “Each person has the potential for negative events in his horoscope, too, but whether they will actually occur depends on the level of the person’s spirituality.”
In his work, Hubernator refuses to make astrological prognoses of events.
“Most people come to me hoping to find out the future because they want to be able to place the responsibility for their lives on someone else’s shoulders,” he said, “and just want to be commanded how to act.”
Instead, Hubernator says, he tries to prompt clients to make a conscious decision to act for themselves. He said he tells them about both the positive and negative alternatives envisioned by their horoscopes – and he can also provide advice on how to work toward realizing the positive outcome.
“In life, each person has a field of obstacles that he needs to pass through in order to learn and grow,” he said. “And for some there are more obstacles, and for some there are fewer.”
Yasynsky described the function of astrology as trying to help remove the unnecessary obstacles and to allow the individual to conserve energy for spiritual evolution.
“Astrology gives access to the most intimate sides of the soul; if used for the wrong reasons it can do much harm,” Yasynsky said. “But astrology can also be used as the perfect instrument to understand what tasks I have in life and which resources I have to help me accomplish them.”
