Station to Station: Canterbury Tales

This post was originally published on Astrology News Service

Alex Miller

Geoffrey Chaucer might have called this “The Smith’s Tale.”  On 12 November 2024, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, leader of the 85-million member Anglican Church, resigned his office in response to an outcry about a lack of accountability among church hierarchy.  The indignation and anger were spawned by a Church of England investigation released the week prior, which exposed Welby’s failure to notify authorities of allegations of severe physical, psychological, and sexual abuse of boys and young men by a staffer at a church summer camp in the 1980s.  Welby was aware of the charges at least as of his elevation to Archbishop in 2013, and likely earlier, but took no steps to bring the offender to justice.

The man in question was John Smyth, a dormitory officer at the Iwerne Trust’s camps, who may have regularly and savagely beaten as many as 30 boys in his care, causing bleeding and leaving permanent scars.  When the allegations first surfaced in 1984, Smyth was asked to leave England, but no further action was taken, and no advance warning given to local church authorities when he moved to Zimbabwe, where he established his own camp along the same lines, and may have abused up to 85 more persons.  Smyth had not been called to account for his behavior when he died in 2018.

Now here’s where the station comes in.  Stations are periods at which celestial bodies appear to slow, come to a standstill, and reverse direction in the sky.  This is an optical illusion, based on the triangulation between Earth, the sun, and any third body, but it has a massive impact in astrological interpretation.  Stationing bodies in a birth chart exert a much greater influence than typically, and represent either defining character traits, or persons and places that are pivotal in a biography.

Such is certainly the case for Justin Welby, with asteroid Smith (alternate spelling of Smyth, the man whose misdeeds have brought the Archbishop down) at station in his birth chart.  Surely few individuals have had a greater impact on Justin Welby’s life and reputation than John Smyth.  Born 6 January 1956, Welby’s asteroid Smith is conjoined by two other stationary asteroids – Bishop and Nemesis.  Bishop of course reflects Welby’s ecclesiastical career (he had also been Bishop of Durham before his translation to the primacy), which is all the more remarkable in that Welby started his career life as an oil executive, and didn’t train for the church until his late thirties.  This out-of-the-box career change represents the psychic pull of his stationary asteroid Bishop, resisted at first, but inevitably coming to the fore, allowing Welby not just to join the clergy, but to ultimately rise to the highest echelons of church power and authority.  Asteroid Nemesis represents ruin or undoing, often self-created, which is the case here, with Welby’s inaction at the root of his downfall.  Blameless himself, Welby’s was a sin of omission, in not reporting the alleged abuse.  Put it all together, and we have a celestial image of a prelate (Bishop) brought low (Nemesis) by someone named Smith (Smyth), a path laid out for Justin Welby from birth.

The glaring warning signs don’t stop at the birth chart, either.  When Justin Welby was appointed to lead the Church of England on 9 November 2012, asteroid Smith was once again at station!  This time it closely opposes (180 degrees, halfway across the zodiac) a telling conjunction of asteroids Canterbury and Justiniano (for Justin), a pairing which helps explain the choice of Welby for that office, aligning the two in the collective unconscious.  Asteroid Smith in this placement directly conveys the threat Smyth represented into Welby’s new position.  And when Justin Welby resigned on November 12^th, due to his failure to take action against Smyth, asteroid Smith was returning to the degree where it appears in his birth chart, reactivating in real time the latent potential for John Smyth (Smith) to act as an agent of Welby’s downfall (Nemesis) as Archbishop (Bishop).  Chaucer couldn’t have employed better irony if he’d written this one himself.

Alex Miller is a professional writer and astrologer, author of The Black Hole Book, detailing deep space points in astrological interpretation, and the forthcoming Heaven on Earth, a comprehensive study of asteroids, both mythic and personal. Alex is a frequent contributor to “The Mountain Astrologer”, “Daykeeper Journal”, and NCGR’s Journals and “Enews Commentary”; his work has also appeared in “Aspects” magazine, “Dell Horoscope”, “Planetwaves”, “Neptune Café” and “Sasstrology.” He is a past president of Philadelphia Astrological Society, and former board member for the Philadelphia Chapter of NCGR.  His two decades of chronicling asteroid effects in human affairs can be found at his website, www.alexasteroidastrology.com.