I'm reading a very lovely book by Jessa Crispin called, The Creative Tarot: A Modern Guide to an Inspired Life.About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. -Kurt Vonnegut
There is a part where she describes how we use Tarot and Astrology to help us draw attention to certain parts of out lives and expand our understanding, as a way of creating meaning.
Then she takes a look at the word consider. She takes this from a book called Words as Eggs: Psyche in Language and Clinic by Russel A. Lockhart:
The -sider part of consider comes from the word for "star". Like the word sidereal, which means "of with respect to distant stars." Or siderated, which means "planet-struck." A sidus, then, was someone who paid attention to the stars. And as this person paid attention to the stars, she would begin to notice certain patterns. When a star or planet was postioned just so, certain things would happen in her life or in the world. And she would note it. And when there was a different combination of stars, the circumstances would change. And she would note it. And so, consider started its life as con-sider, meaning, "with the stars." Co-existing.
Our sidus would share her knowledge with another sidus, and so on, until a system of meaning and symbolism was built up. And that's how the rather complex system of astrology was born.
