Whilst watching a documentary on the breaking of the enigma code in the second world war (after the initial heroic efforts of Polish mathematicians something done by the British at an old manor house at Bletchley house) I discovered that the German high command created the ultimate encoder, with 10 separate encoding cogs, and they called it: secret writer.
Ironically a rather simple and profound image, the writer, in secret, the writing that is itself secret… and in this sense they created a phrase that seems oddly apt for the whole concept of the birth chart, and astrology itself. Surely in symbolic form a secret writing, not from one Nazi leader to his general staff, not at all, but from life to life itself. The birth chart is a hieratic language, a secret language, on one level because you have to really stay with it to even understand a little part of it… with the secret writer the encoder its messages were so complex that the British and Americans generated what was essentially the first computer, the aptly named Colossus (this was no notebook) just to play out the different potentials of meaning within the code and make decisions about which lines might hold real meaning.
Now if you approach astrological information on this purely linear level you might yourself find that you require a Colossus, or at least a colossal effort in order to even begin to understand the many ramifications of the symbolism of the birth chart. Indeed such an effort is almost always present in the initial phases of a person exploring astrology, or other corresponding symbolism. Yet it cannot remain a purely linear knowing, this code is a non-linear message, a container of multitudes… like an encoding machine, with 12 sets of cogs or wheels the birth chart rotates this 12 possibilities in endless unique ways in order to create a fractal of potential meaning of a particular moment in space and time, the birth of a human being.