Normal

What is normal, if not someone else’s standard?

I have been thinking about that question a lot this week.

It started with a natal chart. Not mine, someone else’s. I’ve always found them fascinating in how it confirms what you already sensed but couldn’t quite articulate. Watching the language of astrology name things that had always been true but never had a framework around them.

Then I thought: this is older than the thing that taught me to be suspicious of it.

What was never fringe

Astrology. Numerology. Past life regression. The Akashic Records. Human Design. The Clairs - clairvoyance, clairsentience, claircognizance, clairaudience, claralience. The idea that we have lived before and carry the memory of it forward. The idea that stars at the moment of our birth say something true about who we are and why.

These are not new age inventions. They are not the invention of crystal shops or wellness influencers or anyone with a podcast and a Patreon.

They are ancient.

Astrology has been practiced for at least four thousand years - predating most of the world’s major religions as they exist today. The Akashic Records - the concept of a cosmic library containing the soul’s entire history across lifetimes - appears in ancient Hindu, Buddhist, and Theosophical traditions. Numerology traces back to Pythagoras and beyond. The Clairs were not named by modern practitioners. They were simply the faculties that certain people in every culture across every century were known to possess: the healer, the seer, the one who knew things before they happened.

What changed was not the practices. What changed was the framework that decided they were dangerous.

The borrowed shame

Here is what I find most interesting about the people who feel they need to keep these things private.

They apologize. They qualify. They say things like, “I know it sounds crazy”, or, “I don’t really believe in this stuff but”, before admitting they’ve been reading their birth chart for twenty years, or that they had a past life regression that changed something fundamental about how they understood themselves.

I have done it too. I know the reflex.

But the shame was borrowed. It didn’t originate in the practice. It was placed on the practice by systems that had reason to suppress what they couldn’t control; the personal, direct, unmediated experience of something larger than the self. The woman who healed with herbs. The one who read the stars. The one who remembered more than she was supposed to.

We met some of those women in The Harbinger. We met more of them in The Enigma.

Book 3 will go somewhere deeper into this territory; into a moment in history when these practices were not just practiced but central. Not fringe. Not secret. Not something to apologize for before mentioning at a dinner party.

Normal. In the truest sense of the word.

What I’ve tried

I want to be clear that I am not writing about these things from the outside.

I have had my natal chart done. My Human Design. My numerology. I have sat with past life regression practitioners and received information I could not have manufactured. I have experienced the Clairs - not all of them equally, but enough to know they are real and not metaphor. I have worked with the Akashic Records as a concept and as a practice. I have meditated in ways that opened doors I didn’t expect.

None of it replaced anything. None of it required me to abandon what I already believed. It expanded it. The way a good book expands you; not by telling you something foreign, but by naming something you already knew.

That is what I write about. That is what the series is built on. The idea that the woman who lights a candle and isn’t sure why is not irrational or strange or in need of correction. She is remembering. She is following a thread that is older than the framework that told her to be embarrassed by it.

The normalization that’s already happening

Here’s what I notice.

The woman who doesn’t believe in any of this, shares a natal chart with her friend anyway.
The woman who would never call herself spiritual, saves every horoscope that feels accurate.
The woman who laughs at past lives asks, quietly, what you think happens after we die.

The curiosity was never gone. It was just taught to apologize before speaking.

I am not interested in making anyone believe anything. I am interested in writing stories that make it feel a little safer to be curious. To follow the thread. To ask the question without prefacing it with, “I know this sounds crazy”.

It doesn’t sound crazy.

It sounds ancient.

…and ancient is just another word for normal - before someone decided it wasn’t.