The Spell of being told…
The Spell of being told…
Reflecting on my recent writing of Field Whispers (on Substack), I found myself drawn further into contemplation than I had anticipated. Perhaps this aligns with the approaching Sagittarius Full Moon. Sagittarius embodies the seeker, the storyteller, the one willing to venture beyond the surface long after others have settled into their conclusions. While some archetypes prompt us to gather and organise, Sagittarius encourages us to persist, to keep asking even when the question becomes inconvenient, even when certainty has long since left the room.
Sitting beneath the lantern light of this week’s sky, I noticed something slip through the side door and continue speaking after the page had ended. Over the past few days, my mind has been moving in unusual ways, like a needle tracing invisible patterns, weaving between astrology, consumerism, mythology, seduction, belonging, memory, and self-knowing. And yet I kept arriving at the same place. None of these conversations are separate. They all converge on a single question: who told us this was true?
Astrology once existed beyond its current consumerist embrace. It was not merely a predictive tool or a catalogue of fixed meanings, in which houses equalled outcomes and transits guaranteed results. It functioned as a language of observation, a symbolic relationship with movement, a way of understanding the psyche’s journey through seasons, thresholds, and cycles of becoming. Then, somewhere along the way, as with so many living things, a subtle shift occurred. Symbols that once breathed became flattened. Living systems were reduced to keywords. Archetypes were transformed into identities. The symbolic became literal, and a language designed to deepen our relationship with life slowly morphed into another product to consume.
Today, we hear the same phrases endlessly repeated: Jupiter in the tenth house signifies career success, Saturn in the seventh house predicts relationship difficulties, and Mercury retrograde causes communication breakdowns and technological mishaps. These phrases have become shorthand, repeated so frequently that the repetition itself begins to feel like truth. Yet I often wonder: if someone lived alone on a remote farm far out west, with no ambition for status and minimal contact with society, what would a Jupiter transit through the tenth house truly bring? Would abundance suddenly appear at their isolated paddock gate? And if someone were stranded on a deserted island, would Jupiter make them more visible simply because a symbolic formula suggested expansion?
The question isn’t absurd. Its absurdity is precisely the point. Somewhere along the way, we confused symbolic movement with literal prediction.
Perhaps Jupiter was never primarily about career opportunities. Perhaps it was always expansion itself, expansion of worldview, meaning, perspective, possibility, and faith. But how that expansion manifests depends entirely on the individual life receiving it. It enters the psyche first and only then seeks expression through circumstance, environment, age, experience, and consciousness. A twenty-year-old moving through a Jupiter transit does not inhabit the same symbolic landscape as someone at seventy, and neither of them lives the same psychic reality as someone approaching ninety. The younger person may be discovering ambition and public direction for the first time. The elder may be contemplating legacy and contribution. The ninety-year-old may be sitting with meaning itself, pondering what remains after achievement has ceased to define life. The symbolic weather may be identical. But the landscape it is received in has changed entirely.
This is where I believe something fundamental has been lost, and not only within astrology.
There is a subtle exchange occurring beneath all of this, and it has perhaps become so normalised that we rarely notice it anymore. We gradually surrender our internal orientation to external authority. Not because we are incapable of knowing ourselves, but because certainty is strangely seductive. There is comfort in being told. There is ease in having life interpreted for us. But interpretation and self-knowing are not the same thing, and the distance between them is where something quietly goes missing.
I was recently reminded of aromatherapy. I had studied it for a very long time, in fact, to qualify, gaining high credentials, and what surprised me was how closely it mirrored this same pattern. Essential oils originated from a direct relationship with plants, informed by observation, chemistry, medicine, and lived experience. Then commercial systems arrived. Relationships became products. Dilution, adulteration, and synthetic reproduction followed. Eventually, many people stopped asking about the plant’s origins and focused solely on its promised effects. The living thing had become a transaction.
This pattern repeats itself everywhere. Food becomes chemistry. Education becomes memorisation. Spirituality becomes branding. Astrology becomes prediction. Not because these things are inherently empty, but because we have increasingly learned to extract from them rather than enter into a relationship with them.
An image kept returning to me as I sat with this: a bird inside a cage.
The bird is fed, sheltered, spoken to, and protected from uncertainty. Everything appears comfortable from the outside. But beneath that comfort, something begins to happen. The bird no longer needs to forage, navigate, or rely on instinct because all its needs are met externally. Then one day the cage opens, and a strange reality presents itself. The bird has forgotten how to survive. It has forgotten what it means to be a bird. Not because it lacks intelligence or strength, but because unused capacities become dormant. Instincts unpractised become distant. Relationships forgotten become dependencies.
This is perhaps where many of us now stand—not trapped—not broken. Simply overconditioned toward an external orientation. We have grown so accustomed to asking others about our identity that we have forgotten to ask ourselves. We trust interpretation over intuition, maps over landscapes, explanations over direct encounters. And a compass does not vanish because our attention wanders. It remains, quietly orienting beneath the noise, beneath the trends, beneath the borrowed certainty. It waits. Perhaps this is why the return feels less like learning and more like remembering.
I don’t think we’ve simply become addicted to prediction. I think we’ve become addicted to seduction itself. Not romantic seduction, but the seduction of certainty, convenience, and external endorsement. We live in a world constantly telling us what is desirable, valuable, and worthy of pursuit. And if enough people repeat the same narrative long enough, something peculiar happens. Repetition begins to disguise itself as truth.
I often reflect on fashion, for instance, as it is a useful mirror. Who decides what is fashionable? Who determines that one season a colour is elegant and the next it is outdated? Is fashion objective, or is it an agreement, a collective story people unconsciously participate in? Fashion itself is not inherently false. It can be art, expression, identity, and contrast. But what fascinates me is how quickly collective belief transforms preference into perceived truth. When enough people wear something, it becomes fashionable. When enough people repeat a narrative, it becomes fact. This process permeates far more of our lives than we tend to notice.
A childhood story comes to mind: rumours spreading like feathers torn from a pillow into the wind. Once scattered, they cannot be gathered again. They drift, multiply, and separate entirely from their origin. Narratives behave the same way. Once a symbolic idea enters the collective consciousness, it begins to move independently. People repeat it, others inherit it, and eventually nobody remembers where it began. They simply know it is widely accepted, and wide acceptance has learned to pass itself off as evidence.
This perhaps names the deeper issue. It is not that narratives are inherently dangerous, but that we increasingly inherit conclusions before we have encountered life directly. We are told what success looks like before we understand our own values. We are told who we are before we have had the chance to discover ourselves. We receive maps before we have walked the landscape. And over time, a subtle dependency develops. We stop looking inward because looking outward seems more efficient. Why endure uncertainty when someone else appears ready with an answer? Why tolerate confusion when systems are so eager to explain it to us?
Convenience quietly takes hold. We reach for something when we have a headache, something to help us sleep when we can’t, and something to distract ourselves from discomfort. We seek prediction when we feel uncertain and ask for answers when we’re lost. Convenience isn’t inherently a problem, but it becomes problematic when it consistently prevents us from engaging in our own lives.
Beneath all of this, I keep returning to the same quiet wondering: what exactly are we trying to continue? We speak of progress, of keeping pace, of moving forward, yet toward what? Accumulation? Achievement? Identity maintenance? Or have we simply grown so accustomed to movement that we no longer pause to ask why we are moving at all?
I believe this is why old myths persist. They never truly disappear. They simply wait for us to recognise ourselves within them. The underworld was never merely a subterranean realm. It was always the place where certainty ceased, where adornment faded, where no one remained to define your identity for you. It was the place where essence alone remained. And this is where true remembering begins.
Genuine self-knowing is not the beautiful destination it is so often romanticised as being. We imagine that turning inward will be empowering, liberating, and affirming. And sometimes it is. But what if it feels disorienting at first? What if deep self-awareness reveals not certainty but distance? Distance from inherited identities, from communities built on performance, from narratives once believed to be entirely our own. Authentic self-knowing can be costly, not because truth punishes, but because it rearranges us.
There is a quiet grief in this. If a person spends years conforming to inherited expectations, they may eventually begin apologising for the very qualities that make them alive. Apologising for depth, sensitivity, curiosity, contradiction, solitude, and the inability to remain predictable enough to comfort others.
I understand this from the inside. I have found myself apologising for movement itself. For wanting to explore, expand, contract, disappear into solitude, and emerge changed, for not remaining fixed enough to be easily understood. Yet living things were never designed to remain fixed. A river cannot stay a river if it forgets to flow. A forest does not become a forest through symmetry. Weather does not ask permission before changing direction. And humans were never meant to function as static architecture, yet we increasingly apologise for change, for evolution, for depth, for not remaining who we once were.
I sometimes wonder if this is why so many people feel exhausted. Not because they are carrying too much life, but because they are carrying too many containers. Containers are inherited from family, culture, systems, expectations, and collective agreement. And eventually, maintaining the shape of the container becomes more exhausting than simply living.
Somewhere along the way, I absorbed the quiet suggestion that being loved meant becoming understandable, and becoming understandable meant becoming containable. I am no longer sure that is true. Perhaps love was never meant to be contained. Perhaps it was always meant to witness. Perhaps relationships were never designed to freeze another person into certainty, but to remain present as they unfold.
Because living things unfold, they evolve. They surprise themselves.
And perhaps the deepest fear beneath self-knowing is not discovering who we are. Perhaps it is discovering that who we are might not fit neatly into the world we have built around ourselves. Yet maybe that has always been the real invitation: not to shrink ourselves into the container, but to question who built it in the first place.
Who defined what a successful life entails? Who established the ideal of love, beauty, spirituality, healing, intelligence, or even authenticity? At what point did collective agreements quietly become inherited truths, and when did we stop asking whether they were ever actually ours?
The world depends on categories because categories create efficiency. We sort people into labels, personalities, careers, identities, and narratives because containers reduce complexity into something manageable. But living things have always resisted containment. And perhaps what so many are feeling beneath the fatigue and the restlessness is simply the pressure of a life that has outgrown its container.
We won’t necessarily discover our true selves on the inward journey. We might instead discover that we no longer fit the world we inherited. That beneath all the labels, performances, and identities lies something that refuses to be a category. Something that is in motion. Contradiction. Unfolding.
Something that is simply alive.
And perhaps this is why the bird in the cage keeps returning to me. Not because the cage was cruel or intended harm. But because the bird eventually forgot it was built for the sky. It did not need to become something new. It only needed to remember.
And remembering, it turns out, has always been the whole point.
To know who you are, your essence, not your label.
Delahrose Roobie Myer
A scribe, listening to the field.
Author - Fatima's Alchemy
