At the centre of the storm: what the image gets right

“At the centre of the storm” is the title of a book by the astrologer Antonia Langsdorf about the year 2012. The title is more apt than it sounds at first — only it means something other than most people assume. Anyone who hears it thinks of the worst: right in the middle of it, where things are fiercest. In a real storm the centre is the calmest place.

The eye and the wall around it

A tropical cyclone carries an eye at its centre, an area usually a few dozen kilometres across. Hardly any wind blows there, and the sky often breaks open altogether. The fiercest winds blow not in the middle but all around it, in the wall of cloud that surrounds the eye. Anyone caught beneath it therefore gets a lull that cannot be relied on: afterwards the same storm arrives a second time, now from the opposite direction.

As an image for a difficult phase of life it is worth something, because it says two things at once. There are calm places in the middle of an unsettled time. And they do not mean that the matter is over. Anyone who knows both settles in differently from someone who takes the quiet for the end.

Crisis means decision

The word heard most often in such times comes from Greek. “Krisis” belongs to a verb that means to separate, to distinguish and to decide. In ancient medicine it named the point at which an illness turns — for the better or for the worse, but in any case: it turns. What was meant was therefore not a condition to be stuck in, but the short stretch in which something comes out.

In present-day use it has become almost the opposite: something that lasts, and whose end people would like to ask about. The reinterpretation is understandable, but it costs the word its best part. Anyone who understands a difficult phase as a phase of decision looks not for a date on which it will be over, but for what is sorting itself out inside it.

The quantum leap that is not one

A second word turns up almost inevitably in talk about times of upheaval: the quantum leap, meant as an enormous bound forward. In physics it names very nearly the opposite. What is meant is an electron moving from one energy level to the next — the smallest change possible in an atom at all. What is remarkable about it is not the size but that there is nothing in between: no gradual sliding across, no halfway position.

The misunderstanding is forgivable and instructive all the same. The size of a word says nothing about how large the matter is that it stands for — only how large it seems to whoever utters it. In times that are felt to be a turning point, the vocabulary grows faster than its subject.

Why a circle has no end

That leaves the question astrologers are reliably asked in unsettled years: is the end upon us? Something can be said about it that does not hang on interpretation at all, but on the way the sums are done. Astrology reckons in cycles. Jupiter is on the road for just under twelve years before it stands at the same point of the zodiac again, Saturn for about twenty-nine, and the angles between them return in the same way.

A model made up exclusively of such circles contains no final date. It can state that something comes round again, and roughly when. An end it cannot yield, because nothing in it ends. That is neither consolation nor an all-clear, but a statement about the reach of a method: a pair of compasses draws no straight lines.

What is left in a difficult time is more modest and more usable than any grand announcement — the information that phases have a length, and a few words to describe your own situation. What this field is about as a whole is set out under Astrology; the orbital periods of the individual celestial bodies are given under the Planets.