marsandchariot - Tumblr blog

[marsandchariot]

Fixed signs in angular houses

Fixed signs (Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, Aquarius) in angular houses (1, 4, 7, 10) may struggle with sources of permission to change their ideas of who they are, where “who they are” is something they view as an intrinsic, unchangeable foundation. These types have mutable signs in their 8th houses and cardinal signs in their 12th houses. With cardinal qualities in a cadent house (challenges) and mutable qualities in a succedent house (resources at our disposal), processes of change and ideas of beginning again represent key factors in evolving one's self-perception. One must re-learn to be “themselves” or reconstitute the self in the face of loss, especially when what is lost is something or someone viewed not just as an integral part of one's life, but a basis of their identity. Fixed sign types can go through this process of loss many times without it imparting any stronger a relationship with the cardinal (beginning) or mutable (changing) parts of themselves—they may continue to value most the parts of themselves that are “unchangeable,” seeing these qualities as who they “truly” are, relegating the parts of themselves that feel doubt and vulnerability as less “real,” even when the experiences that incite these feelings of instability or rupture are key to growth and conviction. Or, they may crystallize experiences of loss as self-defining, without being willing to metabolize this experience as anything other than its literal or original appearance in their lives. For fixed sign types, loss must be reconfigured as something mutable so it can assist in the process of regeneration.

Fixed sign types may have to accept that change is not purely that which is imposed upon us from negative or coercive experience; not an external prescriptive authority but a strength to stay “with the trouble” within—-where the trouble is not what’s wrong out there, but what feels cracked or unsettled inside us. Don’t wait—-investigate. Your 8th and 12th houses will show snags in the depths of your self-experience (I would also include the 4th, but its association with roots and family makes it feel like a separate project). The 8th house speaks to journeys to the underworld from which we return with new knowledge; it speaks to inheritance, or what resources come to us through loss. The 12th house speaks to transformation, rebirth; the bottoming-out, the last stop from which return is impossible, only continuation onward. Taurus rising will have fire in the 8th and 12th—-the necessity is to act. For Leo rising, with water in these houses, the answer is interior experience, that which cannot be surveyed by others, but is the place where you become yourself. For Scorpio rising (air in 8H and 12H), a trust in the immaterial and imagined possibility of the future is the best strategy to move towards that future, to make it real. For Aquarius rising, the work (earth 8H and 12H) of belief and faith are more rewarding than the static boundary of skepticism—-the deification of “objective reality” is not serving you (nor is it serving reality). Those with Taurus on the ascendant, Sagittarius in the 8th house, and Aries in the 12th can expand their inner landscape through consolidating and validating their own practice through consistency rather than waiting for their practice to “become” legitimate by resembling the work of others. Be atheistic; do not look to a single source of authority for what you do. Disparate representations of your personal practice and experience should not threaten the validity of what you offer, but allow you to better see yourself in a variegated context or community of approaches. You are hesitant to build your authority when your authority doesn’t look exactly like someone else’s (or conversely, you may fear you are too similar to be “unique”), but consensus is not what authority is for; authority is for creating a beacon bright enough for others to find you, and to exist within a lineage of those who do the same. The world should work in a way where there is an infinity of replenishing signals like these, so everyone can find their way. There should never be just one, nor should there only be a few. By seeing your difference as a necessary, guiding light among many—-and seeing your likeness to others as contributing to the haven an identifiable community—-you can better envision yourself within a lineage, even if the past and future of this lineage are not yet apparent to you. You will not know your lineage until you know your practice, and you will not know your practice until you trust your habits enough to guide them. Identify less with a “lack” of consistency and more with your embrace of adjustment, with your ability to put conviction and the currency of ego aside (Aries 12th) and re-align with the consistently changing flow of reality according to your own interests (Sag 8th).

For Leo rising, with Pisces 8H and Cancer 12H, you have to trust in the validity of expression as it plays a role in changing reality. To speak something is to give it form. Once something has a form—-even in language—-it becomes a player on the board. The idea that something should not be communicated or made real is an idea that the thing that needs to be expressed will by counteracted or denied by reality; not expressing a vulnerable feeling or idea, by your logic, may be what keeps it safe or intact (or that protects yourself and others from it). With Cancer in 12th, the relationship to difficult emotions is like the parent that over-shelters their child; the child is kept inside because they are too sickly for the world, but their sickly disposition is actually developed from never leaving the darkness of their bedroom. By evaluating their vulnerability as an inherent and unchangeable weakness, Leo risings prevent their emotional pressure points from undergoing the same strength-building activities as other aspects of their personality that they are much more comfortable flexing with others—-those qualities that feel inherently useful, agreeable, entertaining and resolved. An over-performance of “being fine” prevents you from accepting invitations to heal. The parts of you that you worry are “too much” are actually suffering from a lack of exposure. These are things you maybe don’t allow to reach even in your conscious awareness. Pisces 8H may make you feel that if you allow yourself to go deeper, you won’t be able to return, to swim back to the surface, or that that surface on which you rely to be “yourself” won’t survive this kind of deep self-interrogation. But 8H journeys allow us to bring back something useful from the darkness, whether material or not. Luke Skywalker, in the cave, sees his father wearing his (Luke’s) own face. This experience was not immediately positive but it was obviously necessary; the strength of Luke’s ego, of his understanding of the binary of light and dark, right and wrong, was actually getting in the way of understanding the skills he needed to develop in opposition to his father’s legacy. Your change/transformation resource may lie in learning to relax the tension that keeps your fears hidden from yourself, because once you see your fear, you will be able to name your need.

Scorpio rising, with Gemini 8H and Libra 12H, needs a safe way to imagine a future outside of material circumstances. They need to imagine people they’ve never met, relationships and support they’ve never had, and ways of knowing themselves that undermine their own self-understanding. This is less out of the need to develop a more empathic approach and more because it is difficult for fixed types to stray from what they already know is possible and available, which makes it difficult to change habits and to bring them into contact with different people and experiences (which becomes an issue when they find themselves encountering the same issues in relationships, jobs etc. over and over again). The twins in the 8H speak to shadow work—reintegrating the abject self. What version of yourself have you created through the periodic rejection of certain inherent qualities? Piece by piece, you have constructed a complete, suppressed other You—-a shadow, a legitimate complementary half of yourself—-that you need to accept in order to accept also the invitations that are seeking to include you on the basis of your whole self. The invitations that seek to value this wholeness will not come or will not be available to you until you are present in a condition prepared to receive them. Libra 12H speaks to a reluctance to be seen as “needing help,” and to resentment towards those we feel are trying to “counterbalance” or “absolve” us rather than simply trying to include our shadow in their embrace of us. The shadow is not comprised definitively of weaknesses, vices or “dark” behaviors, but of whatever parts of us that we consciously castigate or reject. Our capacity to love, or to accept happiness, if we suppress these, can be shadows. Libra 12H may give you the impression that people are trying to “change” or “correct” you, but they are only attempting to listen to the parts of yourself you’ve put away.

Aquarius rising, with 8H Virgo and 12H Capricorn, may struggle with feeling their views are being taken seriously while at the same time resisting taking the views of others seriously if they cannot see the logic or share in the belief that motivates those views. They see themselves as approaching problems objectively, and frame their feelings as logical reactions. Just as they wait for logic to validate their emotional experience, they wait for material (not necessarily scientific) phenomena to trigger their belief. These types may feel that in challenging others to explain dissonant viewpoints, they are protecting themselves (and protecting the sacred principle of Reason) from falsity and dogma. They experience faith less as a process and more as a single conclusive result; not the road leading to conviction but the moment when conviction becomes unshakable. What this quality or pose of discernment actually creates is a universal and therefore inflexible standard of value. Instead of seeing their knowledge as something sacred that they protect behind a fortress against the slings and arrows of misinformation, Aquarius risings might operate more dynamically and adaptably by locating their knowledge in an image of bricklaying—-in the act of building the fortress, not as the thing within it; the ongoing process of fitting pieces together to create something coherent. The incorporation and swapping in and out of small units to build something stable—-rather than using a pre-constructed wall to keep things out—-allows Aquarius risings to mindfully participate in the changing nature of their knowledge system, rather than working to gatekeep or defend it.

[marsandchariot]

Mars and the Tower in Gemini

(image from The Hermetic Tarot)

Because Mars, like Saturn, is a malefic (as opposed to the benefic planets of Jupiter and Venus), we might consider the onset of its influence in Gemini (beginning on March 3rd) through qualities of challenge or disruption, with factors of positive growth or change becoming more accessible or recognizable as the transit continues.

We might recognize Mars in the impulses we wish later we hadn’t acted on, despite feeling a surge of emotion at the time that told us what we were about to express was true or right. Mars’s Tarot equivalent, the Tower, speaks to radical, difficult, or painful change, change that can feel like a destructive force if we are unwilling to work with it. The image of the Tower doesn’t necessarily describe change itself, but our fearful attitude towards it, or the way we experience it as a kind of utter loss. We might feel tempted to place blame somewhere in the face of jolting or difficult experiences. Whether or not we saw it coming or even knowingly took steps to aggravate its progress, change in accordance with the Tower feels like a loss of control, a traumatic dislocation or dissociation of the self. This may describe many different forms of becoming un-stuck, or falling out of joint. Lynn Bell has described Mars as where we have impact; maybe it can also describe where we feel impact, and how we react to it.

If you’re looking at the card from the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, the Tower looks pretty precarious to begin with--old, most likely already long in the process of deterioration, i.e. in need of some renovation. Tragic or scary as it may look, the destructive change underway in the image of the Tower can lead to positive change, or changes necessary to building the next phase of stability.

(image from the Smith-Waite Borderless Edition)

With Mars leaving Taurus and entering Gemini, we might bring a bit more of a spark or apply a radical angle to the things we do and the way we work in order to frame our contributions as offerings to others. With Mars in Gemini, it’s a great time to be a novice, to surprise yourself. In Gemini terms, the Tower might describe the productive instability incurred by new and even contradictory ideas. It might refer to necessary alterations to the ivory tower of elite intellectualism, inviting us to imagine how we might rebuild the tower, or if we’d rebuild academic and “high” cultural spaces as a kind of tower at all. Instead of rebuilding, we may benefit from observing the rubble for a while.

A tower looms over all, claiming an ability to see all, know all, consider all. How can we divert our active, propulsive, Martian energy to experience movement in multiple directions? How can multidirectionality (or intersectionality) serve as a baseline for cultivating focused and empathic understanding of multiple perspectives?

It might be helpful to think of Mars in Gemini setting up for the planet’s entrance into Cancer by late April. If Gemini operates in the technology of ideas, and Cancer builds from the material of emotion, what is it that feels important to launch into the air, even briefly, so that when it falls downward, or when you no longer see it anymore, you can trust that it has sunk itself into a structure of deep feeling?

The twins are non-hierarchical. They are not, for example, a parent and a child, a performer and an audience member, nor a teacher and a student; they are two entities that share a secret, or are embarking together on a journey into a mysterious place. They are not competing with one another; they prefer one another’s company above all else. They speak in a shared language that they didn’t mean to invent; coded descriptions simply emerge between them, and help them to identify what’s hidden and invisible in the surrounding world. In short, they share for the joy of sharing, because they know that collaboration is how knowledge takes shape.

For the following considerations of Mars in Gemini, we will look at the topics of the houses as impacted by this Mars transit, drawing also upon Mars's Tarot equivalent of the Tower. With Mars cutting its way through the twins, it is worth it to ask: what is separating or crumbling? What is coming together, or fusing, via the alchemical power of lighting and fire? Where Mars splits something open, when lightning strikes the Tower (so similar in appearance to the word “I”), what is it that comes out? Susan Harding describes “apertures in the ordinary” as disruptions that provide opportunities to speak. In other words, when something ruptures, it provides an opportunity to tell a generative story, which, as M+C, is at the heart of what we hope to offer.

(image from Small Spells Tarot)

MARS TRANSITING GEMINI IN THE 1ST HOUSE

You may be doubting yourself in terms of intellectual abilities. This has little to do with how you yourself experience your internal world, where thoughts are quick, agile, and interesting, leading you to investigate unfamiliar fields or topic areas. But you may feel a stagnancy when it comes to expression. Understand that that stagnancy or feeling of being unable to communicate your knowledge is not a deficiency but an unfair pressure you put on yourself to usefully demonstrate or disseminate your knowledge in legible or impressive ways.

Instead of attempting to share everything with the most people, individuate what you’ve learned; consider who in your social world would be most interested in what you have to say. If what you want is to connect, you can; you just might have to be more mindful and do so on a 1:1 basis, tailoring what you share to each individual based on who they are, not how interesting you personally find the information.

In this case, the jolt of Mars, the bolt of lightning, is a gift you give to others. In your own experience, when lightning strikes the tower, it probably thrills you. Consider the difference between concentrated electricity versus electricity in the atmosphere. What are the situations where you’re creating static versus the ones where you’re being clear? Are you more interested in a heightened, invisible tension or a single, visible impact? For these next few weeks, be mindful of the results you want, and be careful about your aim. You have the power to communicate more than your own intelligence.

MARS TRANSITING GEMINI IN THE 2ND HOUSE

You may be experiencing an anxiety over what you can claim as your own. The force of Mars might make you feel separated from your usual topics of interest. You may be worried that your focus or interests are mimetic of others’, or of something that already exists; you may be feeling defeated by an inability to see your work or your insights as “original.” This may cause you to want to tear down or blow up this work you have been constructing. But what if instead you gave your work the permission and the time and space to develop its own mouth, its own projection of speech? Allow your work to breathe and fully realize the thing it wants to be--existing beyond, or outside of, the compulsion to compare. When we call something derivative, we are reaffirming capitalist mythologies of material fetishism, intellectual ownership, and a lack of alternatives except the one dominant mode experience.

Gemini in the 2nd house is about entering communities by sharing a response to what is already there, not by pressuring oneself to generate a new topic; by adding layers of connection rather than a shock of distinction or separation. Instead of possessing a field, or an atmosphere, or an audience, Gemini in 2nd, by practicing self-possession and being honest about how one perceives or experiences something, exudes their own alluring atmosphere, which comes from a direct translation of how they think about things. You may not experience your own aura as striking, but your honest transmission of your experience, more with the excitement of a phone conversation than the gravity of prophecy, imparts to others an originality of relation that arises from the sense that you learn about topics by becoming friends with them, by earning their trust. When ideas or things we learn about are our friends, they don’t just reveal information, but they can provide us with actual advice. We don’t need our ideas to be strikingly original; we need to build relationships with them, so that, as in any relationship, we can experience the gift of their difference and transformation over time.

MARS TRANSITING GEMINI IN THE 3RD HOUSE

Busy bee. A lot may have been added to your plate, or a change in schedule has left you in a pinch in terms of getting everything done. Don’t try to do it all, but don’t think of yourself as “dropping” something in order to make room. Figure out, instead, what you can put aside, or approach in a partial or modified way until you can resume the energy to address it again. Instead of seeing your fatigue as a failure to meet demands, try and incorporate this Mars transit as an indication that you are entering a new phase of juggling multiple expectations and routines. Mars is not pointing to a weakness or depletion, but of a need to make room in the existing order.

When we look at the Tower we might think of the Tower of Babel, a symbol of the human desire to encounter God. Seeking to maintain his omnipotence and singularity, God punished the Babylonians by destroying the tower and separating the people via language, preventing their coordination in the future. The story attributes a lack of universal and mutual understanding between people to punitive divine will.

What is it that we expect from the divine? We may call it many things--God, or luck or circumstance--but when we assign an entity the role of determining situations outside of our control, it can in some cases prevent us from locating aspects of those situations within ourselves. When we feel stalled or punished by some force (whether seen or unseen), it’s important to take the time to ask ourselves what we are working toward and why, and what, as a reflection of the answers, might need restructuring, or what might not need to be built at all.

If we feel the approach of a breaking point, we’d do much better to focus our energy on bending. Work with your parameters in a way that honors the element of air and the m.o. of the twins--change directions, and delegate. What trajectory are you on that no one is insisting you remain on, except yourself? What are you trying to sort through on your own that you could talk through with someone else? It’s not a character flaw to change your approach to your schedule so that you are allowing yourself, at least once a day, to prioritize your own restoration.

MARS TRANSITING GEMINI IN THE 4TH HOUSE

You could be feeling some discomfort in your home life, whether that’s reaching a point of tension or conflict with a roommate, or having conversations with family members that seem to go nowhere. Instead of a burst of movement or change, Mars might have introduced a sudden awareness of the stale areas of your life. Mars in the 4th house is asking us to reconsider our routines, especially the aspects of them we practice unconsciously. Some of our habits are so deeply held that we may not understand they can be changed. We may replicate traditions of our childhood--ones that aren’t necessarily negative, but ones that simply no longer serve our happiness. We may set arbitrary rules about what we should eat, or when we should do things, like watch TV, read, or do nothing. We may be so desperate to be physically and psychologically healthy during a time defined by illness that we have become our own nagging, overbearing parent, exacerbating our own boredom and self-resentment.

Let Mars kick those real or imagined eyes of surveillance out of your head. If you have a Tarot deck, we recommend you look at the Tower card and let it act as a representation for the mental exercise of clearing your mind (or you could even use the images of the Tower included in this post). You might meditate on the image and close your eyes; imagine yourself sending a bolt of lightning into that point in your psyche where you envision these controlling voices live and tell them to get lost. You deserve to be liberated from their control.

4th house Geminis: you can live however you want. No one is watching you. You don’t need to coordinate with anyone. You don’t need to wait and see what others are doing. You don’t even need to plan ahead. Try acting first and apologizing later; don’t resent the lack of clarity or permission as a way to prevent yourself from being a bit more spontaneous within your own sphere of experience.

MARS TRANSITING GEMINI IN THE 5TH HOUSE

Hit send! Submit your work, your proposals, your effusive text messages. Find opportunities to pursue, even if it’s just entering a raffle, or bidding on something in an auction. Whatever you’ve been working on, or whatever desire you’ve been half-nursing, get it out there, or begin shaping it so you can let go of at least this iteration of it. Provisional conclusions are your friend right now. Trust that you can say what you need to say in this moment, with the resources and feelings available to you. Even a prayer is something that you give over to an invisible network or channel outside of your immediate control, and in this way the idea of sending something into the world is also an exercise of letting something go, a leap or an act of faith.

Even though the fall from the Tower feels like a self-destructive risk, it’s likely that it feels liberating too--in both material and immaterial ways. If you’ve been working hard, it’s time to open the windows, take the lid off. Otherwise you run the risk of the work and your worry shutting you in and shutting you off. Don’t let your energies solidify into rock.

Eventually outside forces and voices will intercede or interject. One of the Tower’s Kabbalistic meanings is related to the mouth; it’s time to speak and/or let some outside nourishment influence or add to your ideas and projects. The energy of the relinquishing act is its own reward in that it teaches us a way of relating to what we love that is generous, creative, and inwardly lightening and restorative. Whatever it is, get it off your chest, or send it on its way.

MARS TRANSITING GEMINI IN THE 6TH HOUSE

You may be encountering a challenge that involves the navigation of a complex system; the transit here very much speaks to tax season, or the challenge of paperwork. It could be about wills, property, and other kinds of titles. It could be about getting yourself organized so you can see all the resources that are available to you. It could be that there are archives that need to be put into order so that you can actually use all the information you’ve collected. There is a pattern in your life--materially or psychologically--that is waiting to be discovered. Follow the feeling of Mars for the next two months. What are you drawn to? What are you repelled by? These signals are telling you what’s available in your extrasensory repertoire. They’re telling you what kinds of behaviors, thoughts, or other inclinations are no longer serving you, or what you’re undergoing for the sake of the space these things take up in your life. You may even be worried that without these behaviors or interactions in your life, you will be more bored, or you worry you will miss them when they’re gone. Divert your path. You can find things more worthy of your energy and attention; Gemini in 6th can always adapt to changes to the network.

In the Smith-Waite deck, the figures falling from the Tower are surrounded by Yods, a Hebrew letter that also symbolizes a dot of energy, a spark of fire and life. These marks appear throughout the Tarot, especially in the S-W deck, as points or moments of generative potential. While changing things up (even just thinking about it) might generate feelings of anxiety, at the same time movements of change create new energy. You don’t need to balance your life between what you hate and what you love, or what you fear and what you want. Follow your “nose” (your heart? Some other Martian organ?) toward objects, people, and mindsets that linger with you in a way that is both challenging and pleasurable. Do not mistake resentment for challenge, and do not mistake fear as something you have to bury. Feel for the sensation of something that lingers like a question, or an itch--what generates electricity in your body or the surrounding air. Clear space around that feeling so you can examine it; look for Yods. Chances are what you are unlocking is a key or a clue to the challenge of establishing a new, creatively generative system, one through which you can communicate to yourself and others with a surprising or refreshing clarity. Don’t get frustrated with yourself; enjoy the challenge of the game.

MARS TRANSITING GEMINI IN THE 7TH HOUSE

This might be you right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mxyz1UwHGFA

In looking at the Heaven’s Gate birth chart, Mars in Gemini in the 7th house seemed to speak very directly to the way couples were required to separate in order to exist within the community. In the HBO documentary, one of the men was sharing a kind of deep sorrow that he experienced when separating from his partner of many years, and the urge he felt to propose that they leave Heaven’s Gate so that they could be together (he did not end up saying this to her). Mars in the 7th isn’t just about the separation of the romantic pair bond, but the challenges of all aspects of intimacy, the way we struggle with ourselves to express things to another person, and the way we struggle to hear what they have to say to us. It can also be the desire that draws us to others in a way we can’t explain. With Mars transiting your 7th house, make sure to be present for the way you are experiencing your intimate, perhaps emotionally difficult relationships. Do you feel like you are able to get distance from your feelings, or do they overwhelm you? Do you feel the need to argue on behalf of your feelings, or, in conflict, can you sit with the unfairness of your perspective as it may feel unrecognized or unacknowledged?

Instead of the desire to use conversation or argument as an outlet or a primary outward expression of difficult emotions, try to bring the difficulty of conflict into a different or less immediate context than with the person who your emotions immediately relate to or concern. Talk to someone else. This might be about “airing out” the feelings of conflict rather than directing them towards a purpose or outcome.

(image from the Tabula Mundi deck)

In Kabbalistic thought, the Tower represents the mouth; and, speech, like the top of the tower, or the crucible, might be the opening that attracts the destructive activation of the lightning bolt. You may feel tempted to spout fire, especially in the direction of a loved one, but, before you do so, try to take a moment to consider the effects this will have on your immediate relationship or environment. Is the scene depicted in this card the kind of results or energy you want to foster? If you are seeking change, is this what you want it to look like? Here it might be more useful to look at the Thoth deck. To do so, we have included a picture of MM Meleen’s version of Crowley’s Tower. In the heat of chaos, the source of discontent matters less than the approach to recovery. How can you divert the force of your words--while remaining true to your feeling--in the heat of the exchange? Can you find a way to examine the feeling without making it a part of a contract or negotiation? When you are ready to share for the sake of sharing--not for the sake of achieving a certain outcome--it may be that the other person has an easier time hearing what you have to say, and you won’t feel the value of your expression wrapped up purely in the way that they react to what you express.

MARS TRANSITING GEMINI IN THE 8TH HOUSE

Go deep. This is a great time to lean into a divinatory practice, particularly Tarot, which helps you to focus your feeling into language and recontextualizes your language into imagistic forms, the descriptions of which provide answers. Use creative dialogue--prompts where you have to ask yourself questions and answer them. Book an appointment with a reader of some kind, or set an intention with a therapist that helps you to excavate a point of uncertainty or difficulty that you are having a hard time working out on your own. Mercury, domiciled in Gemini, delivers messages between the underworld and the surface world. Gemini in 8th is about bringing the depths to light, not necessarily so they can be shared, but so they can be meaningfully integrated in the way you understand and experience yourself. With Mars transiting the 8th, it may be that something has sent you downward, or inward, in an unexpected way. It could have been a trigger, something that in a straightforward way feels unrelated to trauma but nevertheless has made that trauma feel very present. Try not to see being in this place or mindset as if it’s a setback, but rather a challenge to your abilities of mental resourcefulness; feel around in the dark for the tools available to you, and celebrate that you are not with nothing.

You might take out the Tower card from your own deck of Tarot cards or use the ones provided in this post and meditate/converse with the images there. What kind of immediate thoughts or physical reactions do you have toward the card? If, at first glance, all you can perceive are negative messages, what if you tried connecting these to changes or next phases that you would consider positive? You might even choose one of the figures (again, here, referring to the Smith-Waite deck) and imagine that you are them, falling through darkness and fire. If you knew that in the end you would be physically okay, how might you use this inward, metaphorical “fall” as a potential space for personal revelations and transformation? Or, if a visualization of the fall is too much, imagine the figures once they have finally reached the ground: disoriented, lost as to where to go or what to do next. Try not to focus on climbing out of the darkness, but rather find ways to set up camp for a while, and to let your eyes adjust to what is there. And always remember that the card that follows the Tower is the Star.

MARS TRANSITING GEMINI IN THE 9TH HOUSE

You may experience the onset of this transit as a kind of rebelliousness or a “storming the palace” energy. Use it. Argue with your superiors on behalf of those you love and admire. Say what you need to say in order to make space for productive exchange, not only to critique. Be mindful of shots fired. Be honest but not cruel. If you are responsible for young people, as in an educational field, teach them strategies to experience anger, and to honor it as a useful tool for advocacy. Be the lightning bolt in the Tower card: assertive yet precise. Remember that the things you say--even one thing--carry the potential for cataclysmic effect. Use your own anger to advocate for others rather than focusing energy on harming those you might have positioned as antagonists, otherwise you risk becoming the antagonizer yourself. Remind people in power that their confusion is their own challenge and not your responsibility. In some cases this might mean stepping back and letting some of those that you care for “fall from the Tower,” knowing that this can be a loving act, even as it operates as a necessary learning opportunity. Remember that often we are protecting some people from the ignorance of others.

If you are thinking of ways to disrupt a structure you exist within while being aware of the ways in which it is harmful, think about ways you might attract lightning, or ways to welcome powerful transformative force. Like Walter de Maria’s lightning field, which “is intended to be experienced over an extended period of time” and “does not depend upon the occurrence of lightning,” you may find your inclinations better served by setting the scene for change to occur, rather than ushering in that change yourself. Laying the groundwork, or discussing widely and clearly the necessity to do so, remains a valuable contribution to the process of overall change.

We don’t need to rectify privileged ignorance; we only need to provide reminders that the ignorance of a few should not have the power to delimit the experiences of many. Take space by giving reminders that that space exists, whether the powerful acknowledge it or not.

MARS TRANSITING GEMINI IN THE 10TH HOUSE

Facilitate a meeting of the minds. You are probably the hub for several different social groups, and it is likely that you can think of people in these different areas of your life that would benefit from knowing one another. Think of a selection of your social world that would most benefit from a convergence of some kind, and make it happen. You don’t have to feel a responsibility to host, per se, and it may not even be the case that a large group (or email chain) makes sense, but for this transit you might want to think about connecting people who you think ought to be in touch with one another. It may be your job or your public role in some way to do this for others already, but with Mars coming through, it may be a productive challenge to think about conducting this role of connection by considering different topics of connection than you normally would. Like the flash of lightning that disrupts the stability of the Tower, subsequently creating a space for necessary change and dynamic thinking, how might you also shake things up in your communities that need it?

The resulting fire in the Tower is not simply disruptive; it is fabulously alchemical. It may be that you facilitate a connection between people who could enter into a kind of productive conflict, rather than a conventionally harmonious situation. Whatever you decide to do, it could potentially bring greater excitement into others’ lives if you consider the ways in which the people you introduce to one another are very different, rather than very much the same.

MARS TRANSITING GEMINI IN THE 11TH HOUSE

You may have taken on more than you actually wanted to in terms of zoom groups or other meetup type things to pass the time in this past year. You may have said yes to so many things out of the idea that too much is better than not enough, but now you don’t have as much time for yourself as you would like. You also may have figured initially that joining different kinds of arts or leisure communities could be a way to unwind, but you ended up taking on more responsibility in these situations than you initially anticipated--again, out of the idea that it would be interesting, provide more opportunities, be inherently rewarding. Mars may be asking you either to cut ties with certain community obligations or just to change your habits related to the amount of community responsibility you feel energetically capable of or interested in taking on. Don’t feel bad about “abandoning ship,” like the figures in the Tower card. Anticipate your exhaustion. Anticipate your boredom. Listen to your intuition telling you it’s time to step back--it might be trying to save you from a lightning strike or a burn-out. Before you say yes to any new roles or zoom meetings, think about what it is you’re actually willing to do, and be willing to admit what it is you want to get back. Are there times when you want to experience a more passive role in your chosen communities, where someone else is directing or organizing? Maybe ensure that if you continue participating in multiple community settings, there are instances in which you are not in a primary leadership position. A sense of being taken care of, at times, can be the pleasure of existing within a group. Remember that this kind of pleasure helps to strengthen your bond to other members of your community, and in some ways the cultivation of this bond is more useful than an assumption of leadership.

MARS TRANSITING GEMINI IN THE 12TH HOUSE

For some reason you rarely forgive, permit, or celebrate in yourself the same qualities you recognize as valuable or forgivable in others. You are very well-versed in the value of disruptions, of flaws, of setbacks; you even know how to counsel others through the difficulties of grief or loss in order to bring them back in touch with the generative potential they themselves possess. For whatever reason, however, you are hesitant to accept this kind of forgiveness or gentleness from yourself; you may delay asking others for help, or putting yourself into a position to receive the advice that you know others can give. The 12th house, renownedly difficult, seems to assert that you must recover alone, that convalescence and strength of will are related and if you cannot endure something privately then you will not successfully survive it. But what you are thinking of as the burden of your pain placed onto others is actually the generosity of vulnerability; by sharing your predicament with others, you are honoring your connection with those others by expressing that you believe they have the ability to know you, to love you, and to help you. It may be hard to believe that others experience your admission of suffering as an affirmation of intimacy. You may be quicker to defend your feelings than you are to express them, perpetuating a cycle based on boundaries and obscurity rather than openness and transparency. It won’t always guarantee solving the problem in your favor, but before you punish yourself--or others--for the feeling you have, remember that you are the only one who can access what that feeling is. Mars is poking a hole in the fortress, and inviting that feeling to escape.

It may be that, as in the Tower card, you have been living in an upper room, mentally speaking, where no one can reach you. This room is not related to status or confidence, but simply the way you see yourself, or what you know about yourself to be true, fixed, constant. This vantage might keep you safe from the contradictions in your thinking, which is a way of keeping you safe from others’ judgments. But when we talk about a fall, it’s not so much about falling in the esteem of others, but about not being able to rely on the stability of your feelings and thoughts. What bothers you most is not the fall, but the activity of rebuilding the safety of structures you previously assumed would last.

More so than most, you may feel a sense of vulnerability or discomfort in the way you experience your own contradictions. Gemini in 12th might describe the way we protect or preserve our own self-conception; you believe that if this (the Tower, the structure of the “I”) remains stable, then stability is possible in other areas; if it feels unstable, then so is everything else. But when you climb down from the tower, you might see that embracing contradictions are actually what help us to live among other people, as well as to accept ourselves as a fluctuation, or a renegotiation, and not a monolith. In this case, the threat of the lightning bolt might tell you that if you don’t make preparations to climb down from the Tower, the Tower will create the situation for you.

(image from the Anima Mundi Tarot)

[marsandchariot]

Lunar New Year Considerations

In honor of the Chinese Lunar New Year on February 12th, we wanted to draw into conversation a few of the archetypal relations between planets, signs, and Tarot. By acknowledging these alignments we feel we can begin to speak to strategies of conceptualizing universal, long-term intention within the space of individual will.

By some accounts, the order of the signs in the Chinese Zodiac was determined by the outcome of a race between the animals, which involved crossing a river. In the case of 2021’s sign, the Ox, fording the river was an easy feat. For the Rat it was more challenging, and so he enlisted the help of the Ox. This kind of assistance, to the Ox, was nothing, so he was glad to do it. However, when the Ox reached the other side, the Rat leapt to shore, coming in ahead. As a symbol of this new year, the Ox may speak to principled provision for the movement of others whether or not they “deserve” it and whether or not that provision is “rewarded.” A race contradicts the shape of the zodiac, in which all signs are both before one and after another. Beyond the conceit of the race, there is no hierarchy in the signs. The Ox may remind us of ways that we can expand our understanding of achievement through sacrifices we make in the interests of others--even if that understanding applies to an increased sense of when sacrifices are too great or too many, and require us to more clearly elucidate personal boundaries as a result.

Though we may expect movement or lightness from Saturn’s transit into an air sign, Aquarius is also fixed (as opposed to cardinal or mutable). The experience of fixed air, rather than a dramatic deviation from the cardinal earth sign of Capricorn, highlights points of synonymous connection between fixed air and cardinal earth. It does us well to remember that Saturn is domiciled in both signs. While Capricorn felt heavy, almost cloying at times, as if a weight were intent on dragging us backward rather than helping us move forward, we were still moving, even if only in resistance to inertia, and with considerable, discernible effort. Taking into account the scant although intense time spent in Aquarius thus far, we might be learning that levity does not necessarily lead to momentum, or greater range of motion does not equal speed. Instead of the cold weight of earth, we have parched, stale air. In the interest of minimizing dejection, however, let us also remember that both Capricorn and Aquarius have experience with and valuable perspectives of water—Capricorn of its depth and Aquarius of its vast surface.

We might describe perspective as individual, and movement as collective. Though in some ways we feel the energy of forward-orientation, we have to wait for this energy to disperse and manifest itself across a spectrum of ritual processes and understandings before it results in something more akin to collective action. Perhaps it feels like the childhood game of “Mother, May I”. We probably wish we could sprint ahead and leap across the river (though it’s more likely we will wade and sink into it: next month is a new moon in Pisces; in May Jupiter will move into Pisces, its ancient domicile), but that feels in many ways like it requires a power of flight we don’t yet possess. Even though we have entered a prolonged period of air, we’re still more or less stuck on the ground for now.

Here are the cards we selected to help us consider this feeling of stasis more deeply:

THE STAR:

The Chinese Lunar New Year occurs on the first new moon that appears between January 21 and February 20. On February 11th, when the moon was at its newest, she was near the end of her stay in Aquarius, whose tarot equivalent is the Star. The Star is the phase that comes after a huge disruption, a radical change, like an attempted coup or a violently contentious regime change. The Star wants to recuperate, wants to reconnect with what’s essential: the conditions for positive transformation and healing. The Star is the first in the sequence of Star, Moon, and Sun in the Major Arcana, which occurs after the Tower and before Judgment. It is a fall from the Tower that conversely sends us upward, through a celestial sequence that concludes in resurrection, re-embodiment and re-integration. The Star wants us to ask ourselves--wants us to remember--what it is we actually want: for ourselves, for our communities, for our planet. In this way, this new moon was a good time to set intentions and goals for not only your individual growth but also for transformation at a source level for all. And that is the first step. The Moon explains for us step number two.

THE MOON:

Although the new moon occurred on February 11th in Aquarius, its transition into Pisces on the day of the Lunar New Year shows that the moon does not conform as cleanly to our measurements of her cycle as we would like to imagine. Pisces is also the equivalent of The Moon card; in considering Piscean modes we can draw from the Moon a few ideas of how to approach our unconscious selves in ways that advance individual needs within collective conversation, which is to say we progress from the aspiration of the Star to the meditative contemplation at play in the image of the Moon.

In the Moon card, we see two towers, much like the twin pillars in the card of the High Priestess, a card which Selah Saterstrom describes as representing the alternative to binary consciousness. In the Moon we also see the emergence of a subterranean entity, a third figure. This feels reminiscent of all water signs, but the card’s equivalence with Pisces elucidates the relationship we may cultivate to our unconscious as dark or esoteric, from which we expect certain “truths” to emerge, sometimes without developing a practice that brings us into communication with ourselves in a regular or sustainable way. When we think of our deeper self as a catacomb from which painful ideas might burst forth and surprise us, it becomes harder to cultivate a loving relationship with those dimensions of our emotional life that we suppress as abject or inappropriate.

The coinciding of Pisces with the new year might suggest the beginning of a process in traversing the boundaries between conscious and unconscious awareness, without characterizing our unconscious as perhaps secret or forbidden. On this occasion we may reject the binary imposition of progress, which implies that we leave one state and enter another; we embrace a “third” option, which is that of fluid exchange, of exit and re-entry, an experience of consciousness defined by a fluctuation of coming into and out of. This is the nature of the moon.

While the Sun is about creative and contemplative dream work in service of conscious action, the Moon is about facing our shadows and integrating them into our conscious being as a basis of our presence in the world. The Moon reminds us that we can’t move forward without meaningfully addressing and integrating our flaws and wrongful past actions. While on the level of individual consciousness the Moon is about shadow work, on the level of the collective it is about reparations.

Tarot decks used: Smith-Waite Borderless; Small Spells

[marsandchariot]

Mercury Retrograde through the lens of Reversals

No matter their ubiquity, Mercurial retrogrades always seem worth discussing—whether as a scapegoat for mishaps or as an invitation to subvert our typical approaches and modes of living in relation to communication, coordination and planning. Mercury is the planetary androgyne, ruler of Gemini and Virgo, and the messenger between the underworld and the surface world, facilitating an exchange of information between what is perceptible and what is not. Robert Hand describes Mercury as “neither the maps themselves, nor the languages, nor the mechanical media in which data is stored, nor…any of the representational signs themselves. It is the process of creating the maps or the languages, of storing the data or the signs, and of making sure that maps created in one medium correspond to the original set of experiences, ideas or signs that the map represents.” Beyond material practices, such as reading and writing, we might also see Mercury’s mapmaking technology incorporate psychic, spiritual, and mental health tools.

We decided to consider some principles of this retrograde through the lens of the Star—Aquarius’ equivalent—paired with the Magician—the equivalent of Mercury—in reverse. As in the case of retrograde versus direct, a reversal is not strictly the binary opposite of the upright position.

Looking at the Star and the Magician, it’s hard at first to see the similarities. But both have something to say about balance, given the positioning of their arms, the actions of their hands, and both figures are surrounded by verdure .

However, the way these figures inhabit their surroundings is quite different. In the Star, there is a sense of freedom and openness. Often this card conjures for me the image of Milton’s Eve in Paradise Lost when she is drawn to and mesmerized by her own reflection in water (a moment that also makes me think of Lilith). She turns away because of the insistence with which Adam demands her attention, prescribing the narrative that she should be concerned only with his needs and desires.

But, within the Star, one is able to remain in that space of meditation and reflection in service of their deeper, at times imperceptible desires, and in doing so they are better able to attune themselves to the vibrations of the collective. An inner space in service of receptivity and attunement is an ideal space of creativity, where ideas can self-generate without judgement, and pour out, seemingly without end. Without disruption.

Here is where we see concepts of Mercury creeping in. The Star is about the free-flow of ideas, tapping into the unconscious to see and contemplate what is drawn forth, what fills the cups and fertilizes the earth (or The World, the card that seemingly “ends” the cycle before beginning again with The Fool’s leap into the unknown). The Star asks how these ideas might manifest in the material world. What kind of inner environment are our thoughts creating and cultivating? How does ideation contribute to expressions of our desires? Our highest selves?

And of course we cannot ignore the stars, the card’s namesake. Above the figure’s head, the cluster of stars in the light blue sky conjure up the ever-presence of the constellations and their mythologies. They genuflect to how and why we read our birth charts, a snapshot of the stars and planets in the sky at the time of our entrance into the physical world, in order to understand the influence and trace impressions left by archetypes in the makeup of ourselves.

The bird over the figure’s right shoulder (from our perspective in the Smith-Waite card) is simultaneously among the stars and sitting in a tree--either caught in the act of landing or preparing to take off. As Rachel Pollack points out in Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom:A Book of Tarot, the bird “is an ibis, a symbol of the Egyptian god Thoth, who was considered the inventor of all arts, from poetry to pottery. Literally he taught the first artists their techniques, but on a more symbolic level, we can say that all creative action stems originally from the pool of unformed energy.” In the image of The Star, the figure simultaneously gazes into and draws from and disperses water, a symbol of this vibrant and unformed energy.

Somewhat similarly (but importantly different) the Magician has all their creative tools at the ready. Like anyone who practices an art or skill or ritual, the Magician has collected all the tools they will need and has set the table with them. With their Hermetic pose--“as above, so below”--the Magician calls to their muses or gods or guides, creating (both literally and figuratively) a bridge for communication. The card signals an understanding of this relationship between the physical and the spiritual, the inner and the outer, the importance of this connection, this communication (here is Mercury again).

However, where the Star expresses/embodies this relationship nakedly and mostly only via cups and water, the Magician has on layers of clothing and all the different kinds/methods of tools at hand (the pentacle = earth, the cup = water, the sword = air, the wand = fire). The Magician tells us we have the ability to create, that we have all the tools we need, but asks how we will use them. Will we use them? Do we know how to use them? Are we acting as a conduit? And if so, for what? Or are we skipping this important first step of opening lines of communication which the Magician is enacting for us, focusing on material means rather than psychic or spiritual cultivation?

It makes sense that the Magician is linked to Mercury. The archetype reminds us that all of our tools for communication/expression need a space at the table. All of them need tending. The cup represents our emotions; the pentacle, our material conditions; the sword, our thoughts/words;,and the wand, our actions. No wonder when this card is reversed (or when Mercury is in retrograde) we feel as if we are fumbling, that we have lost control of how we form expressions, as well as how we receive them. The tools we usually trust are overwhelmed by the frequencies they encounter. Even on our best days, it can seem difficult to align all these facets of our relationship with the world, being reversed (or in retrograde) makes it all that much harder.

We can also think of The Star in reverse. During a Mercury retrograde in Aquarius, as a collective we might feel even more psychically blocked, like all of our thoughts are stuck, or we are not easily understood; like we can’t get anything out of our head and materialized in the physical. We might feel unable to find the right words, create narratives that make sense; we feel we are disconnected from reality when what we are more feeling is a disconnection from our inner selves. Maybe we feel too much the demands of others, allowing ourselves to be distracted. Perhaps our thoughts are feeling more like mud than flowing water; instead of a reflective pool we see only the dregs of the earth.

Aquarius zooms out to look down, gaining perspective by separating and floating above. By this vantage, Aquarius seeks to understand and design solutions to meet the needs of the collective. But sometimes the presence of the collective looms larger in the imagination than it does in lived experience. You may feel a pull to perform or provide in a way that creates undue pressure on yourself and your individual activity. Even in solitude, you may feel a lack of time for yourself or energy for your own interests. When the demands of others resound louder for us than our own needs, and we lose track of what those needs are, we are vulnerable to injury and self-desiccation--mentally, spiritually, physically. Sometimes it is easier to imagine and respond emotionally to a lack of collective compassion than it is to cultivate compassion for ourselves. Wherever Mercury is transiting your chart, issues related to that house (and planets with which Mercury is copresent) are lighting up for you. Wherever this is occurring, it is likely that what’s needed is to unplug from whatever theater of others’ perceptions you are enacting in order to impose judgments on your own inner world. Once you disengage from this enactment, you may better receive the input provided by your feelings. It is this feedback--rather than the feedback of judgment--that can inform you on next steps to take in working through blockages imposed upon your activity at this time.

The Star can remind us to look at how Mercury is affecting us personally in our own individual charts so that we can productively work to counteract any “negative” responses or at least to prepare, like the Magician, with whatever tools are at our disposal, and, like the Star, in congress with the flow of energy within.

MERCURY RX TRANSITING AQUARIUS IN 1ST

It may feel difficult to transmit or communicate your needs in the way you’re used to. What strategies—especially nonverbal ones—that otherwise yield results are for these next few weeks falling flat; what you’re putting down isn’t getting picked up. Ask yourself what you are attempting to attract—is it assistance? Reassurance? Solidarity? Praise? Channels you usually trust to bring in important feedback feel blocked, or murky. You’re not being rejected; your signal just isn’t cutting through the fog right now. You may have to ask explicitly for what usually arrives naturally, or you may have to change the way you’re communicating the sense of gap or need you’re experiencing; it’s not as perceptible or legible as you think.

MERCURY RX TRANSITING AQUARIUS IN 2ND

You may experience issues in articulating professional or otherwise transactional boundaries. Things you’re accustomed to doing for others feel during this time like they outweigh the returns you receive. This retrograde might give you a sense of, “What have they done for me lately?” Instead of stewing in this feeling, consider boundaries for the future; don’t let moods determine what you’re willing or unwilling to do. Re-draw your contracts and commitments, and instead of centering your highest energy and capacity, take some consideration for days when your energy is low and your capacity is slim. If you set professional boundaries with these in mind, your commitments will not pose as much of a burden on the days when you would rather do anything but honor them. Our senses of personal injustice can make us feel incredibly alone. These boundaries will be your advocate when you feel unsupported, your proof when you are disbelieved.

MERCURY RX TRANSITING AQUARIUS IN 3RD

Generally speaking, since about this time last year, normal routines have been upended. You may be experiencing a specific or micro increase of this disruption. This could be anything—from finishing a TV show you were religiously watching to no longer having access to a regular medical prescription. You’ve reached the end of a supply of something nourishing—perhaps sooner than you anticipated. It’s okay to grieve even the smallest expirations of our daily rituals and routines; we can’t always predict how deeply felt these losses may be when they occur, and they can set off emotional chain reactions that feel much larger and more all-consuming than the ritual itself. Forgive yourself for reaching “the end” without something to take its place, and try to open yourself to whatever will next captivate your attention. Devote time to closing the gap between the end of one thing and the beginning of another, without putting pressure on yourself to immediately fill the gap. Time spent searching for something to do is as worthy an activity as the new task or routine that will eventually occupy you.

MERCURY RX TRANSITING AQUARIUS IN 4TH

You may be experiencing issues in regard to living situations. I think it’s important to consider this phrase not just in relation to the circumstances in which you currently reside, and the attendant issues of rent, roommates, etc, but also as it applies to childhood, memory, and permutations of wider-spanning political or ecological situations. In framing political stances or inquiries, we are often implicitly asking about our rights to life, and what the standards of living ought to be; we situate ourselves as one surface in a tessellation of needs that though theoretically fit together in congruence are necessarily different in expression. How is it that we can live with others? What is our past experience of others—living together or not—that informs the way we see ourselves as part of a community among them? 4th house issues may describe the ways in which we are haunted by childhood experience. When a cosmic body enters the 4th house, it is stirring up past or congealed—but not quite healed—topics. What feels irresolvable usually feels inexpressible; if something feels difficult to express it may be due to an attempt to express a vulnerable truth that in our past was not heard or was misinterpreted in some way. To be misunderstood and disbelieved by our family, in particular, plants the seed that we may never be believed or accepted by the people closest to us. It may feel easier to make an announcement to the world than to one close friend. How does our audience change the way we attempt to resolve our issues in language? Instead of seeking validation or consummate belief, to whom can you turn in order to feel heard? If there is not an individual in your life who fulfills this need, is there a way in the meantime to crystallize your language so that when a trusted friend presents themselves, you are prepared to share with generosity, lucidity, and confidence?

MERCURY RX TRANSITING AQUARIUS IN 5TH

You may have to adjust your expectations for what you’ve been working on. Maybe things have been flowing easily and have now somewhat stalled. It seems like there comes a time, usually towards the 8th month, when a childbearing person can only utter the phrase, “I’m ready for them to be out of me!” 5th house Aquarius placements may feel a similar blockage in production, where they can envision this form that is fully articulate within them and yet not prepared to be in the world. It is extremely uncomfortable. To switch organisms: in the final stages of avian birth, the pores of the eggshell have expanded to allow entry to proteins that feed the bird embryo. This is to say that the stability of the shell is compromised in order to support the growth of the organism held within. Without this compromise, the bird could not be born. So, 5th house Aquarians, I offer two directives—firstly, hold on to what’s inside you, without seeing the discomfort as a failure to produce, trusting instead that the urgency you feel is itself part of the productive process; secondly, make sure you have not sealed yourself off from elements of nutritive change, even if you consider yourself in final or definite stages of your current occupation or project.

MERCURY RX TRANSITING AQUARIUS IN 6TH

You can justify taking time for yourself. You may feel as if you need to create structure to occupy your unstructured time, especially since opportunities to engage with others can suddenly feel few and far between, leaving us lonely or lacking in some way. Otherwise you may feel the need to fill time with a “productive” activity. But we cannot underestimate the importance of planned planlessness, even when it feels almost too abstract to defend from the invitations and schedules of others. If you are feeling overwhelmed, it is likely due to a lack of unstructured time—an important resource in our efforts to physically and psychically recharge. Your unstructured time is not a blank space in your schedule that needs to be filled, but an important period of replenishment, one in which those things to which you may not usually attend will float to the surface in order to be considered.

MERCURY RX TRANSITING AQUARIUS IN 7TH

Our conditions of estrangement are not set in stone. Who do you need to check in on, and how are you going to do it? Zoom and Facetime have gotten a lot of play as resources of connection in light of reduced ability to be together in person, but this may not be the way you want to communicate with everyone you’d like to connect with. Think about the people you have been meaning to get in touch with, and then consider the medium by which you would most like to reach them. Think about the people who are in your thoughts but for whatever reason—perhaps an anxiety of it seeming “too random.” Make a point of reaching out in some way to the person who’s crossing your mind but you’ve refrained from contacting due to ideas of communication only being normal if it’s consistent (though obviously respect the boundaries of someone if they’ve explicitly asked you not to contact them). Consider too your specific reason for reaching out. Honor the impetus for someone’s presence in your mind. You don’t have to reveal what might be considered pertinent information—if what causes you to reach out is a movie, book, etc. you thought this person might like, give yourself permission to make this the center of your connection.

MERCURY RX TRANSITING AQUARIUS IN 8TH

We might consider the illuminative potential of the retrograde as it sheds light on where we confuse judgments with feelings. While feelings offer feedback on our experience of circumstances in our lives, judgments preclude us from seeking alternative actions and reactions to circumstances outside of our control by entrenching us in cycles that confirm our judgments of ourselves and others. We lose touch with the way we feel and instead translate that feeling into an assumption of others’ negative opinion of us. Sometimes it is easier to either judge ourselves or to defend ourselves against this perception of others’ judgments than it is to investigate how it is we feel. We may seek to change ourselves as we imagine we are in others’ eyes, or perhaps we lash out at those by whom we feel judged. What is important to remember is that this emotional activity is something only we have access to--those against whom we defend ourselves cannot see the inner workings of our feelings and judgments. The 8th house can speak to a need to untangle oneself from the action of the interior, or to calibrate emotional experience to actions we can take rather than judging ourselves through the imagined perspectives of others.

MERCURY RX TRANSITING AQUARIUS IN 9TH

As in what’s potentially unfolding in the 2nd house, you may be sorely feeling a lack of returns for what you’re investing in the institution of which you are a part. But this isn’t quite speaking to an issue of money or professional work. It’s more like a situation where you are speaking to God and God isn’t speaking back--not a lack of support, or a lack of reward, but a lack of faith as its own reward is preventing you from feeling connected to both individual and collective purpose, or your individual purpose as it operates within the collective. Frustrations arise from an inability to derive your own reasons to continue participating or contributing. Maybe a community that was previously physical or in person has become excessively diminished by a translation, for example, to Zoom; or, by going on hiatus, a gathering that once provided stability has instead created instability through its absence in a way that feels unsolvable. The dedication you used to feel as a kind of moral directive, in short, is simply not there. Consider the nature of your faith; what does it need in order to survive? Does it need routine? Does it need an object or material representation? Does it need to create, nurture, revise? Faithlessness often contributes to cycles where we feel disinclined to invest energy in what we perceive as inauthentic structures, or structures that are not demanding or imposing enough that we feel the immediate effects of transformation. Remember that these structures cannot convince you of authenticity, and structures alone cannot work positively upon you without your consent; if you are waiting to be forced into alignment, it will not happen. Find opportunities to enter into ritual practices without objectives of self-conversion; decenter your own belief as a kind of challenge that practitioners have to meet in order to “win you over” or “convince” you. The point of faith is not to be scrubbed of your own skepticism--that’s not what truly compassionate institutions are designed to do. An institution that seeks to remove your powers of discernment is not truly interested in helping you to cultivate an individual purpose or process. What matters on your part within a worthy institution is a willingness to explore the options available to you, and to incorporate from those offerings however they feel useful in the project of daily existence.

MERCURY RX TRANSITING AQUARIUS IN 10TH

Similar to action in the 1st house, you may be experiencing a block in what you’re transmitting to others--not just socially, but professionally. You may feel your efforts, into which, due to this current stellium, you’re able to pour tremendous energy, are going unacknowledged or unappreciated. Remember that while your head is feeling heavy with a crown, others may feel this weight elsewhere in ways that are less visible and bring them to places of depletion. It is likely that in many ways your frustration is a version of what others are experiencing, but the way that you experience it in the context of a public or social role can make you feel as if you are alone and everyone is against you. This can feel extremely unfair. What’s needed here, however, is radical empathy, a recognition that your access to language to describe the unfairness you feel is something to which others at this time may not be able to access in their own situations. What you are perceiving as tacit criticism is in reality the general atmosphere of isolation and alienation as it influences the dispositions of others. If you are looking to see yourself reflected positively in the behavior of others, you will be disappointed. It may feel that your efforts are floating into the ether rather than manifesting in any material way. But this is the work of the Aquarian midheaven (which may be located here for you, if Aquarius is in your 10th house). To respond to the needs of the collective means often to work without evidence of efficacy or receipt. Trusting in these effects may help ease the pain in what you experience as invisibility.

MERCURY RX TRANSITING AQUARIUS IN 11TH

Here instead of an imagined collective you may actually be dealing with a group of people of which you are a part, perhaps a group you are even responsible for governing or organizing in some way. And the truth is it is difficult to continue to provide for people when the resources available to us are so lacking, even if we refer only to the resources of knowledge and information. You are at a loss to provide answers. You cannot give a date at which others’ lives as they know them will resume. You cannot tell people how to live. When you are called upon to offer guidance, try not to think in macro terms of how to live, but rather in the realm of dailiness, of what can be done in increments that build towards a practice rather than an outcome. Study your own habits for clues. Experiment in your own life with diverse and alternative strategies. By diversifying your own knowledge sources and practices, you will be better prepared to honor the unforeseen circumstances that arise among the collective to which you are offering support.

MERCURY RX TRANSITING AQUARIUS IN 12TH

In The Twelfth House: The Hidden Power In the Horoscope, Karen Hamaker-Zondag writes, “To immerse yourself in the 12th house, as if losing yourself in another world, is a process that creates much more inner balance than might at first be supposed.” She describes material creativity--as in a craft--as a way to lose oneself; this kind of creativity is not about designing a project or planning an outcome, but on losing oneself in the action or exertion in the shaping of material. This might be work with clay, or wood; it might be a textile project, or cooking. Beyond the acquisition and cultivation of technique, distinctions and evaluations have no place here; a surrender to technique is about a spiritual investment in the moment without the caveat of outcome. A retrograde here is asking for you to climb out from a place of numbness and into a place of tranquility, which is a state of calm that is not empty or anesthetized but closer to a feeling of unconditional attendance--which is a lot like love. To give rein to embodied practice is to accept the possibility of learning from ourselves, even when we don’t intend to reflect and derive meaning from our experience. The 12th house asks us to trust in the unconscious production of wisdom and knowledge, which a ritual kinetic practice can help us to evoke.

Decks used: Star Power Tarot, Pamela Colman Smith Borderless Edition; Many Queens Tarot

[marsandchariot]

a question for nonbelievers

when we met in the park around the Capricorn new moon in order to set intentions going forward for M+C, we asked each other this question:

what is the tarot to someone who does not believe in tarot?

and when I asked the cards, the king of pentacles responded almost immediately, flapping out onto the table with her bat-like wings.

I almost laughed when I saw her, the response was so perfect.

Of course! Someone who doesn’t *believe* in tarot would see a tarot reader as some kind of vampire or witch and her methods as cloaked in darkness and what she sees in the cards some kind of projection, a weird imaginary. Making it all up for whatever money she might earn. Any claims of intuition or vision just some adornments she wears for appearances, some trick of the light or flick of the wrist.

The six of cups arrived next, but reversed. The card of the stories we tell ourselves, and how those stories affect our belief systems, the lives we live. And, yes, this gets to the heart of what tarot can do: reveal to us the paths we are on and potentially why we are on them and how we might change or alter those paths if they are leading us somewhere we don’t want to go…

But of course, reversed, is how the nonbeliever sees tarot. The delivery of false or tricky narratives. If tarot isn’t real, what else could it do but lead those who seek out a reading astray? Of course, to a nonbeliever, tarot seems deceptive—or, in a less dramatic sense, simply misleading, like fairy-tales can be.

How amazing that the ace of swords came out next. Especially in the language of this particular deck (the star power tarot by sick sad girls) the ace of swords shows how—to a nonbeliever—a tarot reader might seem garish, her tongue sharp, her lips telling tales for the sake of telling them, for hearing her own voice, perhaps relishing in the opportunity to deceive…

But those who know tarot know the ace of swords is about clarity, about precise vision, including the ability to perceive multiple truths, myriad possibilities…

When the seven of pentacles showed herself, we were a bit confused at first. Her message to offer this question was a little more subtle, especially when one tries to remember the card as drawn by Pamela Colman Smith. But when we focused simply on the card as it exists in this deck, the vibe instantly became clear.

To a nonbeliever a tarot reader seems to just pluck a narrative out of the air. She’s just running through all of the possible storylines in her mind, like skimming through a rolodex. Each option as plausible and believable as any other.

But, no again, nonbelievers. The seven of pentacles is about close-reading; it’s about seeing what’s in front of you and considering its implications; it’s about deep communication with the message that wants to reveal itself. The seven of pentacles wants clarity.

Lastly the under-the-deck energy was the ace of cups.

wouldn’t the hand in this ace of cups—to someone who didn’t *believe* in tarot—look simply wicked? with its long pointy red nails and twisted fingers? and the dark liquid flowing out of the cup wicked, as well?

but those who know tarot know that the ace of cups represents divine inspiration, a gift of knowing from source.

Beyond reminding us just how amazing readings like this are and how amazing tarot is, it’s also an awesome reminder for how much meaning these cards can hold—and how much power perception has.

How we approach the tarot is crucial—either as someone requesting the reading or someone giving the reading. If what we expect to see is a closed, prescriptive system of symbols that are meant to "predict the future" but "could be true of anyone and is therefore invalid," then we will read flatly and indexically;

but, if we approach with no predetermined objective, seeing an anthological symbolic order that offers potential for associative and varied methods of focus through each individual's relation to a rhizome of images that continues to live and evolve through the technology of reading, then each reading experience provides an opportunity to commune with a far richer mystery than simply "the future."

[marsandchariot]

Message for the New Year

A Saturn + Jupiter Story-board: from Capricorn into Aquarius + from 2020 into 2021

In this narrative there is both circular and forward momentum being communicated.

The Emperor card (which was the card for 2020 (2+0+2+0=4)), placed next to the World Cosmos card (Saturn’s card + the ruler of Capricorn) + The Devil card (Capricorn’s card), emphasizes a mentality of ‘being on top,’ i.e. above others--a mentality where the self + achievement on the personal level is the priority: isolated from + most likely in competition with others.

In the Emperor card, one figure is raised above the others, her posture and arms emphasizing her individual power. Next to her, the World Cosmos card shows us a figure whose entire world is in her own head. Her individual self is the world for her and, if she wants anything from others, it’s to be appreciated and validated for that perception. Quite directly, this narrative shows us what can happen when Saturn is at home in Capricorn during the year of the Emperor (think: Empire). These are all the worst aspects of the Devil card: neglect of community, narrowmindedness, personal and social restriction, obstruction, dictatorship, and being stuck in one’s personal narrative.

However, with the Great Conjunction, not only does Jupiter disrupt these with his characteristics of expansion + good fortune, Jupiter also accompanies Saturn into the air sign of Aquarius (represented by the Star card). In Hellenistic astrology, Saturn is also “at home” in Aquarius. So, the question then becomes, how will Saturn operate in Aquarius in 2021? The year of the Hierophant (2+0+2+1=5). An archetype that asks us to consult both our inner knowledge and those teachers beyond us that know more than we do. How could the world look and operate differently when it values personal and mutual understanding and communication over personal gain?

To make things even more interesting, in modern astrology, Uranus, not Saturn, is the ruler of Aquarius, so that allows me to bring The Fool card into the mix. This conjunction, therefore, heralds a radical new beginning, the start of a new journey, away from this religion of individuality. The Fool is the card of someone who is ready to embark on a journey of deep transformation, not only for the betterment of the self, but potentially for all.

Meanwhile, the Star card shines her light out. She looks away from the Emperor--and his landscape of divide and conquer--toward the Hierophant card. As such, this transition from earth into air imagines a different world. One in which our personal journeys consider + invite communion + collaboration with others. It illuminates an obscured path, one long covered over by doctrines of individuality, exceptionalism, and the mirage of meritocracy. If nothing else, hasn’t 2020 + the pandemic shown us the folly of that mindset?

Life is not + should not be about personal gain. When we wear masks over our noses + mouths, we wear them to protect others, not ourselves. How selfish have those who have refused to wear them shown themselves to be? Hasn’t capitalism been revealed for its machinations of identity + greed?

The Star and the Fool believe there is another way. The Hierophant tells us that alternative ways of living + being in the world + with each other exist. We just need to go in search of them: both inside ourselves + in conversation with the larger communities we participate in.

Again, the Fool is the first card of the Major Arcana. As such, it represents the first step toward transformation, the belief that there is more to the world than what we can perceive with our senses. The Fool is curious, unabashed to admit that she does not know everything, is perhaps a little reckless in her desire for there to be more to life than what she’s been made to believe thus far. Being the number 0 in the Major Arcana, The Fool seems to remember the cosmos before the world was manifest, before the rules had been placed, when literally everything + anything was possible.

This particular Hierophant card conjures the image of a spiritual pilgrimage. In this way the Fool and the Hierophant reflect each other, and they ask: how can we use our spiritual practices to change our social world? How could spirituality help us build a world where individuality and the acquisition of material things are not the goals, the gods?

We lost a human this year who was trying to grow a mainstream vision of how we might create a social movement that is both spiritual and powerful. I’m not nearly as knowledgeable as Michael was about politics (both U.S. + global), nor do I have his experience with regular meditation, but I’m hoping my practice with tarot and my continued social and political growth can eventually work together to help radically transform the social world we live in. And I believe this tarot story-board is telling us that 2021 and the years ahead are ready for it...if we are.

I recommend listening to the whole panel about “the soul of the democratic party” if you have the time and interest:

[marsandchariot]

Saturn transiting Aquarius in the 12 Houses

Even if you have no natal planets in the sign of Aquarius, the sign still has a place in your chart, and its themes are activated by planets transiting whichever house it occupies. I have no planets in my 5th house, where Aquarius is. In my 4th, I have Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune in Capricorn. For a while I looked ahead to the transition of Saturn into Aquarius—from earth to air—as bringing a potential for lightness, or even levity. I think this view reflected a kind of denial of what Saturn is, what Aquarius is, and what air is.

Over the summer I received a reading—my first ever—from Alice. This was a significantly emotional experience for me, and I am speaking as someone who has Mars in Cancer. I cried a lot, and most of the emotions that surfaced were in response to 4th house topics like family, ancestry, childhood, and belonging. I asked Alice what it could mean for Saturn to next transit my empty 5th house and they said it could describe the act of taking creation seriously.

This part of the reading was almost a postscript to the heart of what we discussed over the course of our time together. Though “taking creation seriously” may seem like a fairly straightforward translation of Saturn (limits, constraint) in the 5th house (fecundity, reproduction, art, pleasure topics), the idea has continued to resound in my mind months later as a powerful and enigmatic imperative. So last night I went outside to see the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, which to me looked like a bright lovely dot, and I decided I wanted to think about this notion of taking creation seriously for whichever house is receiving Saturn right now. I love the idea of people being able to take themselves seriously as creators, to have conviction in the time they spend making something, in whatever medium to which they feel drawn. I hate the idea of people giving up on their capacity to create because they don’t see “the point.” I want everyone to see the point in their individual practices, and to have the luxury of belief in the value of what and how and when they practice, even if they’re working in total privacy or obscurity. 

 As another guiding range of archetypes I consulted the Materia Prima tarot deck from Uusi, which I am a bit intimidated and totally fascinated by. I read the houses using a modified variation of the Churchyard spread, since it involves one card to represent the querent plus 12 more cards. So you have an idea of the aesthetic, here are three of the 12 cards I drew. 

 Find where Aquarius is in your chart. Again, even if you have Aquarius in an empty house, that house is now hosting some very important guests. The joy of the empty house, in my opinion, is the way new occupants allow you to examine what’s being incited in an area of your life in which you were previously less interested, or you weren’t very aware of. This spark of interest or awareness is how I am interpreting at least the beginning phase of seriousness, setting the scene for development of this theme over the course of the next three years. 

 SATURN TRANSITING AQUARIUS IN THE 1ST HOUSE 

 A synonym for this transit might be someone willingly or unwillingly “bearing the brunt” of something, or the feeling that one’s priorities must be deferred because the burden of responsibility to others is too great. This querent thinks it is normal for them to do all the heavy lifting without help, because if they don’t, who else will? It may be that this querent is explicitly depended upon, but they may not see the ways in which they constantly carry these burdens results from a lack of boundaries, of thinking they cannot assert their interests or position at all, and they must drop their lives in order to fulfill responsibilities to their community, no matter how abstract or distant that community may be. They think that when everyone is taken care of, they will finally focus on themselves. They allow the needs of others to set their own boundaries, and so the boundary is never set. Rising air signs, please understand your limitations. Please respect your own boundaries and personal priorities at least half as much as you work to attune yourself to and respond to the signals of others. Set aside some time to let the world go on without you. I think you will be surprised at the space you are able to create for yourself, and the way you are finally able to get your own things done. Alternatively, if the bearing of burdens feels against your will, you may be made to feel like the scapegoat in one or more of your communities, and so the erosion of your time and energy arises from your effort to free yourself from this position or to dispel the collective belief in your deserving of this position. It may be possible to change collective opinion with time, but it is not your responsibility to do so, and the effort it takes will not serve your own energetic health.

 SATURN TRANSITING AQUARIUS IN THE 2ND HOUSE 

 Thanks to the pandemic we’ve all got new stuff for all the new things we’re doing. Interests require tools and subscriptions and memberships and Zoom classes. Investing in new materials, especially when they are technically “productive” materials, helps us justify the way we use our time to spend money. Eventually you will have to use your possessions, though, in order to justify the acquisition of them, or else they are just an idea of creation, an aspiration or intention to create. I drew the Arsenic card for this transit; you can see its relationship to The Magician and its connection to equating material mastery with experience and execution. It’s a reminder that we cannot make the idea of creation into an idol; we can’t manifest our intentions through possession of material as a substitute for the activation of ideas. At a certain point you need to look at what you have, and use what you’ve got, or else your material intentions of creation will serve to isolate you from the generative power of your own creative process. 

 SATURN TRANSITING AQUARIUS IN THE 3RD HOUSE 

 Carve out time to work on your creation. Period. It doesn’t have to be every day, but by developing even the consistency of once a week or month you demonstrate a dedication to your own ability to produce something that cannot exist without your attention. Anyone practicing without professional recognition knows how difficult this faith is to maintain. I have been watching a lot of writer interviews recently. One constant piece of advice they give is to be consistently present for the work—make the space of routine, don’t wait for other peoples’ recognition or respect to justify making time for your creative process. It can feel especially hard to tell people what you’re up to when they aren’t used to taking non-professional practices seriously. But, you know what, fuck them. Your time belongs to you, and the things you want to do, even if you’re not a seasoned professional expert at that thing, are important. Don’t let fears of other peoples’ skepticism run your private life. Advocate for the consistency of your practice. If people can manage to go to church every Sunday, you can manage to write or paint or build or do whatever at least once a week. 

 SATURN TRANSITING AQUARIUS IN THE 4TH HOUSE 

 A lot has happened to you. A lot has happened to everyone, of course, but you may be sitting on or hoarding those experiences, waiting for the “right” way to use them. But now is the time to activate the impressions or residue of what you’ve experienced so you can understand what those experiences are teaching you. You’ve got to start piecing it together, like clues, to make a cogent shape, because there isn’t going to be an a-ha moment that shows you what it all means. You might want to process with the people closest to you, people who know you really well, about the ideas you’re working through. They may have an insight that brings the pieces of the past together in a way that helps you see the larger picture. You may worry that you take in more than you’re able to reflect, which can feel as if you’re stuck in a more passive or accumulating phase. You may worry that by acting “too soon” you run the risk of using up the resource of the past. But the past has more than a single purpose; it continuously replenishes. Begin using it now. You will always have more later. 

 SATURN TRANSITING AQUARIUS IN THE 5TH HOUSE 

 It can be hard to get going when you’re simultaneously trying to predict and interpret the meaning of your creation, then producing into those expectations, then getting stuck when it doesn’t seem like you’re fulfilling those expectations you’ve set for yourself. If you fall short of the expectations of your own practice, you may see yourself as failing; as not being serious enough, or not knowing enough. You may retreat from your practice in order to prepare, re-group, plan. Something that can be difficult is the need to assert the purpose and meaning of your creation in order to justify your work on it. People rarely feel comfortable saying, “I’m working on something, but I don’t know what it’s about,” or “I’m working on something, but I don’t know what it is.” The need to envision the finished product (and to be able to claim that what we’ve made is valuable and worthwhile) presents a serious hindrance to one’s artistic practice. How can you do your thing if you’re constantly worrying whether the thing you do is living up to your expectations? Think about kids whose parents constantly projected their own values onto their child, who made their child feel as if they couldn’t deviate from these expectations. Don’t be that parent! Raise a happy child with lots of options. Don’t crush your creation under the weight of your own expectations, which are often just internalized anxieties of not being good enough in the eyes of a nightmare amalgam of different authority figures. Treat your creation like a child whose psyche you’re not trying to pulverize through micromanagement. Ask where it wants to go, what it wants to be, and allow these impulses to run their course, trusting that for your creation, even what you don’t understand has a role to play in your process. 

 SATURN TRANSITING AQUARIUS IN THE 6TH HOUSE 

 If you are feeling uninspired, or unsure of where to “begin,” this is an excellent time to cultivate a divinatory system or some other system that you use as a visionary tool. Any system to which you gravitate, and which you learn to use in a dynamic way that serves your purpose beyond rote memorization, that answers your questions and creates proposals for your work will, in some way, serve your creative process. I often imagine the 6th house as a grid. To place a grid onto any single surface transforms that surface into many parts. The division of something into parts allows us to deconstruct and rearrange what previously appeared to be a single coherent material. I don’t want to say that your selection of a system is arbitrary, but any consistent method by which you can take stock of the familiar in a way to defamiliarize it will show a way forward in terms of rethinking what’s available to you. Take things apart. Put them back together differently. Isolate elements of the familiar in order to make them strange. You have ideas, you have passions, you have interests. As soon as you take the care in grouping them, tracking them, mapping them, you are seeing more lucidly the unconscious connections you have been making all along. 

SATURN TRANSITING AQUARIUS IN THE 7TH HOUSE 

 Saturn transiting the 7th may speak to a seriousness on the level of commitment or partnership. It could also mean cultivating a kind of faithfulness to a project. If you are working on multiple things, maybe commit to a precious few, so you are better able to devote your attention to these before moving on to another smaller group or single creation. Partnership requires a mindfulness to the other in which we simultaneously do not lose ourselves. Says Carl Jung, “Emotional relationships are relationships of desire, tainted by coercion and constraint; something is expected from the other person, and that makes him and ourselves unfree.” It is important that in our commitment to something or someone, we do not give up our freedom; focus and attention are not the same as imprisonment. For this placement, I pulled the Iron card, whose equivalent is Mars. During WWI, the phrase “I gave gold for iron” articulated the incentive to donate jewelry to the war effort. With gold as the alchemical equivalent of the Sun, the ego, the sacrifice can translate to mean giving up one’s self in service of one’s expression. The creation is not the self, but it draws from the self in order to come to life. It could be that this transit asks for more to be given to creation, or that firmer boundaries are drawn between the self and creation, to better prepare the creation to become a discrete and substantive entity in its own right. 

 SATURN TRANSITING AQUARIUS IN THE 8TH HOUSE 

 Invite contact, invite collaboration. There is the pressure to protect one’s creation from interference in a way that may harmfully shelter it. I don’t think I need to re-hash Colin Craven and the whole point of The Secret Garden, but it is possible to be too precious about your process and your creation, shielding it from the potential of growth. It can withstand more than you think; it is more distinctive than you think; it is more valuable and admirable than you give it credit for. It is possible to shelter your creation so intensely that you even stop working on it, because it’s never the right time, or you haven’t got the perfect idea, or you’re not in the right mood, or you’re not well-versed enough in what you’re trying to do or say. You need to persist for the sake of making your intention manifest, without fear of judgment. You need to bring your creation to light without worrying about its vulnerability to alteration and death. This preciousness may also speak to a kind of purity, where you feel stuck but are loathe to move forward by introducing unexpected elements to your process, out of fear of changing your creation on the core-level. I doubt this kind of “damage” will happen, even if you introduce elements that feel opposite of your original intention. The strongest reactions occur between things that are not like one another. Furthermore, fusions or combinations between unlike elements don’t occur from hesitant proximity; they occur through repeated direct, intentional engagement. Don’t be afraid to bombard your process with the outside world, with new ideas and techniques. It can handle it, and so can you. 

SATURN TRANSITING AQUARIUS IN THE 9TH HOUSE 

Stop looking for an institutional position that reflects everything you offer, and instead find ways to satisfy a fuller spectrum of those offerings in ways both within and without the institution. What you offer as a “full package” is important but often professionally or commercially invisible. This can be an especially difficult way to make a living, and you may have to select a position you don’t feel encompasses your entire range of abilities in order to practice those abilities in a way that is compensable. If the institution doesn’t recognize your full capacity, don’t push. Stop giving everything away to prove you are capable of giving. It doesn’t have to be about money, but you need to develop a personal system of limits or regulations so that you yourself can keep track of the value of what you expend. Just because it comes naturally to you doesn’t mean you should give it away for free. 

 SATURN TRANSITING AQUARIUS IN THE 10TH HOUSE 

 What you’re looking to create may not be a material form at all, but a role you play in the world. It may be a role that is yet undefined, but something you are looking to articulate in simultaneously meaningful and ephemeral gestures. It’s less about a permanent professional station and more of a mutable approach to a unique offering or service. It will take time. Document your process, even if it doesn’t reflect the outcome. You will see traces of the outcome even in areas of the process that don’t “feel significant.” Your work is one of accumulated intentions, diversions, fleeting pieces. Self-illumination is not a single beacon but many spectral lines of emission and absorption. It shows nothing but the portion of the path that’s visible. Air signs linger in distances, in liminal or invisible connections. To play a role in this area may require a mobile or roaming form. You don’t need to produce a final act; show the ways in which any occurrence can continue forward; in which a thing that happens is always happening. 

 SATURN TRANSITING AQUARIUS IN THE 11TH HOUSE 

 How do you want to share with people? Where are the people you want to talk to? How do you want to make space for them to respond? Building community and systems of shared values is an elusive process, subject to trends of culture, language, and technology. It’s important to see beyond strategies of loud and dominant message projection (marketing) in order to value the content you wish to share. Fears of being unheard have the effect of changing what it is we actually say, imparting instead a message that is shared only for sharing’s sake, not because the messenger any longer has conviction in the import of what is said. It is important to maintain the integrity of your creation so that it reflects something that would serve you, if you were in need of it. Don’t treat your creation as if it’s bait designed to lure the most amount of people (or capital). Make available your process of creation—what are the qualities that you resist and embrace in yourself, and how has this process led you toward the creation of something which you truly believe, not just something you believe will “sell”? Often, the most valuable materials are both rare and common. It is a mistake to strive for just one or the other in order to appear uncomplicated. To be comprised of a single element is to become a brand. Brands are clean but they have no souls. If signs of your struggle and honest experience are missing from your creation, then you are only showing half the picture, and there is more to be done. 

 SATURN TRANSITING AQUARIUS IN THE 12TH HOUSE 

If you feel you don’t have the energy to work on your creation, it’s because you don’t. If you feel like there isn’t time, it’s because there isn’t. Sometimes we can’t just add our creation to the list of other tasks we’re doing that day, between walking the dog and picking up groceries and filing our taxes. That just may not be where the creative state is able to situate itself in our lives. If when you think about working on your creation, you feel the same dread as when working on projects you’re compelled to do for professional or academic purposes—if something feels more toiling than generative—it’s a sign to try a different approach. This may require a recalibration of intention. Intention does not have some inherent buoyancy that allows it to surface with explicit clarity into our conscious awareness. You may have to enter a state of sublimation in order to find its articulation. By entering unconscious or semi-conscious states, we can better observe our conscious actions in order to envision a way forward. There are many people who experience the majority of their process in this state of sublimation, only to transition to the material aspect of their process in a burst at the “end.” Make space in your awareness for your emotional experience of your creative process. Don’t attempt to make your labor visible in a way that “looks” like work. Compulsive labor is not the sole determinant of progress. Discomfort is not the sole determinant of labor. Find the executable intention in yourself and cultivate instead a willingness to meet it, being open to all the ways available to you to do this.

[marsandchariot]

Saturn + Jupiter:  the world/universe + the wheel of fortune (part 2)

Okay, so, initially, like I said in the last post, I was going to ask BOTH the Hermetic and Wild Unknown decks about today's (12.21.2020) Great Conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter. However, after I had engaged in the conversation with the Hermetic Tarot and turned to the Wild Unknown and began to shuffle, the cards wouldn't respond. I have taken this to mean that we received all the answers we needed in the conversation with the first deck. So I will respect that and only discuss what messages came through with the first reading. A photo of which is below.

In the top row (below the Magician, which was the bottom of the deck card), I placed the Wheel of Fortune and Universe cards, which represent Jupiter and Saturn, respectively. Because I was going to be asking about those archetypes, I felt they did not need to be included in the shuffling.

When deciding how to conduct this reading/conversation about this year's conjunction (happening, basically, right now as I type), I turned to a valued teacher, Rachel Pollack. Though I have never met her, I have been re-reading her book THE FOREST OF SOULS, which meditates on new ways of approaching and understanding the tarot. So, in her/this spirit, I wanted to engage with the deck in a way that believes and respects the tarot's connection with the divine and the eternal: what Pollack calls "Wisdom readings."

Similar to questions she asks in the book I referenced above, I asked the Hermetic deck the following four questions:

1. how would you characterize/describe the conjunction?

2. what connection can we make with the conjunction?

3. what do we need to do to make the connection real?

4. what will we learn or become if we make such a connection?

Below were our answers:

1. Princess of Swords: this conjunction brings wisdom + informed action (as represented by the snakes, an ancient symbol of knowledge, hovering above and around her head and the princess's forward movement). The snakes also conjure the image of Medusa, a powerful monster-ess who could turn to stone those with whom she made eye-contact. What is the power you hold in your head? What is the knowledge you may have previously been afraid to voice? What systems are ready to be turned to stone? This card suggests a clear purpose/intention; thought turned into action; an emergence out of darkness and confusion; asks "what have I learned and how will I use what I have learned?" The deck's guidebook identifies this card as "the earth part of air," which is poignant since saturn + jupiter are conjuncting in the air sign of aquarius, transitioning out of an earth sign.

2. Ace of Cups (reversed) + hanged man: The ace of cups reversed not only wants us to be gracious for/with others but also with ourselves. How can we give if inside we’re depleted? Engage, for now, with restraint, don't drain our/your resources all at once; recognize + dwell in the crossroads for a bit--this shift from earth to air--so that what you/we do decide to give/contribute is measured and thoughtful. Because the hanged man also finds wonder in its position at the crossroads—what are you/we also excited at the prospect of doing with what we’ve learned? How can we approach this new era of air with wonder and graciousness? With what foot will we step forward first?

3. the Chariot + Knight of Swords: Be present and receptive for this time; come prepared--or prepare your/ourself--for what is ahead. Have we used 2020 to fortify ourselves? Interrogate what kind of armor we have put on. Does it serve or conceal? Have we put up barriers or "armed" ourselves with tools that will operate harmoniously? (This particular Chariot card has consumed me with martial terms. We should also ask ourselves who we think our opponent is?) Take an inventory of your tools (this is what the Magician asks of us as well). These cards could also be encouraging us to show up for and even actively look, if we can, for this conjunction in the night sky (both cards have stars included in their imagery); and to be particularly receptive to the connection. Even if you cannot physically see the conjunction, what do you feel if you imagine it? What does it look like in your mind's eye? Prepare your/our skills; tend to our health, so that we can be courageous when needed (this knight is defined by this deck as also being "the fiery side of air")

4. eight of wands + justice: we will figure out a course of action and how we can work together for a future that is just and fair and balanced. There are many wands in the Eight but all of them work together to make a whole; a whole that is powerful, that generates fire. What kind of powers can you feel being geneated during this time? What is your power source? The Justice card also asks us these questions; and also tells us we need to generate our methods of discernment so that we can be ready for the conflict ahead. Like the Magician, Justice's arms point above and below, while the scales are balanced to her left and right. In fact every symbol on this card represents balance. How can we be generous with those who deserve it and direct with those who do not? How are we being fair? What does fairness look like? If Saturn represents “power + servitude” and Jupiter "riches + poverty,” the Eight of Wands and Justice are telling us that these things can be balanced, that there do not need to be such harsh dichotomies. In connecting with the conjunction, think of the ways you can help to bring fairness and balance to our future.

[marsandchariot]

Saturn + Jupiter:  the world/universe + the wheel of fortune (part 1)

With the Saturn/Jupiter conjunction happening on the 21st (in just a few days), we thought it might be useful to think about the cards that correspond to those planets: the World or Universe, depending on the deck, for Saturn, and the Wheel of Fortune for Jupiter.

At first I laid out those cards pulled from five of the decks I own: the Muse deck, the Anima Mundi deck, the Dreamweaver, the Wild Unknown, and the Hermetic Tarot. Pictured below.

I was immediately struck by how un-like and a-like the cards were, though they all had alignments, within and across decks. For instance, the reflexive circularity of the cards in the Muse and Dreamweaver decks--and the chaotic aspect of the Wheel of Fortune cards in both the Wild Unknown and the Hermetic decks. The "chaos" (in the Wheel of Fortune cards) is organized in the Muse and Dreamweaver decks, while, for instance, the Wild Unknown WoF card seems to have no organization at all. In fact, instead, it looks something like a knitting project that has been attempted without regard or care for instructions.

With these "differences" in mind, I then thought it would be helpful to turn to the oldest deck I own: the Grand Jeu de l'Oracle des Dames deck from 1870. Pictured below.

It actually took me a second (and some research) to figure out which of the cards from that deck corresponded to the World and the Wheel of Fortune that we are most familiar with. The latter was rather easier, but the former was, for some reason, a surprise. Though, upon discovery, was immediately clear, except the figure, in this deck, in the center of the ouroboros is a man, not a woman.

(Notice, too, how the figure in this Wheel of Fortune card, which actually translates to "The Makeshift Wheel," might remind us of the blind-folded ladies in the Two of Swords and Justice cards of the Waite-Smith deck!)

This then gave me the opportunity to begin a side-project I've been thinking about starting ever since I purchased this French deck a handful of months ago: translate the guidebook (which is, of course, in French). Below are the translations for the Saturn and Jupiter cards (thank you, Apple, for including a translation app in your recent software update for the iphone!).

Though the World is card number 21 of the major arcana in contemporary decks, it is #5 in the Etteilla deck and is translated as "the man and the quadrupeds":

"The naked man in the middle of the round indicates that the truth is on the earth [that the figure's club is lowered/leant upon] proclaims you general peace. The attributes of the four evangelists around the circle of the earth are signs of wisdom. This card predicts you happiness, courage, battles won."

According to A QABALISTIC TAROT: A TEXTBOOK OF MYSTICAL PHILOSPHY by Robert Wang, The Wheel of Fortune represents "Riches-Poverty" while the Universe (World) card represents "Power-Servitude."

In thinking about these "definitions" and looking at the cards pulled from the different decks, I am most drawn to the dichotomies presented in the Wild Unknown and Hermetic decks.

In another post (on the 21st), I will engage these particular decks in a further conversation about Jupiter and Mars and their upcoming conjunction to see what deeper/meaningful narratives we can generate to help us understand what the cards and the cosmos want to tell us.

[marsandchariot]

Some thoughts on the natal chart of Heaven’s Gate

William Lilly (b. 1608) popularized the natal chart as a reflection of the individual, but ancient astrology was utilized more as a lens for global (relatively speaking) events like war, agricultural cycles, weather, and the longevity or character of royal dynasties. I love looking at charts in general but I especially enjoy thinking about events’ inceptions as individual narratives that are socially metabolized. Stories jump out of event charts differently than they do from individual charts. If you are someone who considers your own birth chart or the charts of others, make sure also to explore the dates of different events in your life (books, films etc are also fun to examine in this way). Any moment you select is subject to the same archetypal cast of symbols as is an individual life.

This is a bit Aquarian in the idea that we can examine the social through a zooming out from or the collapsing of individual psychologies into macro, mythic surfaces. In keeping with Aquarian themes, I watched a bit of the new Heaven’s Gate doc last night. I wouldn’t say I’m fascinated by cults etc etc, but I can’t help responding to a birth time, and Heaven’s Gate has one! For me this is an ideal reading, where most of what I know about Heaven’s Gate is largely through osmosis. It wasn’t until after watching some of the first episode that I learned that the buildup to what we consider the culminating event was actually ~20 years in the making. I have not studied the progression of--or figures central to--the movement. Some people do their best work when they are immersed in research of a subject; I myself tend toward flash or impressionism, so I want to capture this phase before I continue watching the documentary. 

RISING NEPTUNE IN SAGITTARIUS

I’m thinking of this placement less as a moment of inception (the way we might read it in the chart of an individual, as the experience of separation from the body of the parent, becoming a discrete entity) and more descriptive of the way we might encounter the cultural phenomenon of Heaven’s Gate at first glance. It may feel rooted in occultism or obscurity—Sagittarius carries notions of philosophy, education, intellectual magic; I’m thinking of The Magician card and its depiction of a single figure controlling all the elements, convening heaven and earth in their alchemical process of discovery. We often characterize movements as centering around a single idea, or a powerful persona, as with Charles Manson or Jim Jones, but there is always a larger atmosphere to examine. Neptune asks us to look beyond superficial characterizations of events in order to understand their mundanity in equal measure to their mystique. Foucault refers to all research as archaeological in that it is a type of unearthing or excavation, a making-sense of objects that may no longer exist and so deliver not direct answers but different articulations of fragmented meaning. What is important too is that Neptune may represent the illusion of origins and root causes. From Stalker (1979), “I dig for the truth, but while I do, something happens to it.” Obscurity is not dispelled, but re-oriented. 

CAPRICORN MOON IN 2ND HOUSE opposite SATURN IN CANCER, 8TH HOUSE 

We might think of the moon as the id or the unconscious. Liz Greene describes the difference between the sun and the moon as the difference between aspiration and unconscious emotional need—the former describes an active mode of attainment or embodiment, while the latter is a pulsing lack to which one cannot help but respond. The moon is in detriment in Capricorn, in mutual reception with Saturn, who also experiences detriment in Cancer. This opposition is uncomfortable—the emotional needs are difficult to meet. This difficulty may describe the dispositions of those drawn to the Heaven’s Gate movement; Cancer in 8th may describe one who doesn’t feel “at home”—like the Gnostic subject, who pledges allegiance to the god of an entirely different realm, and must suffer alienation in this realm as a result. The moon’s placement speaks to an unsettled sense of self, a need to strive or work toward a comfortable psychological situation. This moon does not “have enough”—not necessarily in a material sense, but they do feel dispossessed, as if their history and culture do not belong to them, or they do not belong to the history they have been given. 

 ARIES JUPITER IN 5TH HOUSE 

The 5th house speaks to creation, production, a making manifest. What Heaven’s Gate purported to give was a way forward—a strategy, a directive. It doesn’t take particularly complex analysis to guess that for the emotionally listless or dislocated, this resolve would have been seductive. Joan Didion’s collection, The White Album (1979), describes this generation far more incisively and expertly than I will attempt to do here; instead, picture the Aries Jupiter as striding confidently forward without fear, of translating subjective experience into universal understanding, resulting in decisive action. This was not just an idea, but a way to manifest one’s presence in the world; not just about joining a collective, but about using the language of collective experience to articulate higher individual selfhood. 

 GEMINI MARS IN 7TH TRINE LIBRA MERCURY + PLUTO IN 11TH 

With two Geminis exiting the White House next month, it feels important to acknowledge the more toxic stereotypical Gemini qualities at play in tearing the country apart for the last four years (though of course the foundation for such a conflict is deeper-rooted and further-reaching than a single presidential term, as it is unrealistic to attribute the momentum of such movements to simply a demagogue). The Trump argument for a stolen election is one element of what has been described as “mass political disinformation.” Gemini cares less about the truth, and more about how a truth is expressed; less about the effectiveness of an idea, and more about being pleased by its shape. And they won’t be pinned down, held to anything they’ve previously said, if in some later context that thing no longer serves them (if you watch enough Bob Dylan interviews you’ll see what I mean—don’t ask him about folk music, don’t ask him what he believes, don’t ask him where he’s from—if you never tell the truth, then it’s almost like you’re never really lying, you’re just saying things, creating momentum through language).

We can see this stereotype on the one hand as, yes, members of Heaven’s Gate were lied to and manipulated. Gemini’s ruler, Mercury, is a slick operator in Libra. Libra quells doubt, seals holes, soothes unease—all the dynamics involved in the appearance of equilibrium or social harmony. We can see Mercury’s conjunction with Pluto as the god of communication acting in service to the god of death. The rhetoric of Heaven’s Gate is designed to ease its members toward radical sacrifice. The 11th house speaks to communities, groups, friends—the social world, and, in this case, social organization and purpose.

The 7th house is the house of the Other, and is where we may look in an individual’s chart to read their close 1:1 relationships. It would have been important for Heaven’s Gate to discredit the friends and families of their members, to emphasize that these are the people that the members should no longer trust and confide in. The Gemini stereotype here, of manipulation and dishonesty, is projected onto the Other—a Them—to consolidate the self, an Us. Mars here makes the disconnection from loved ones particularly dramatic. Mars wants to cut, to define, to separate; it is the individuating act. It is also worth mentioning Lynn Bell’s description of Mars as the protector of the moon, of the unconscious; if the moon feels threatened, it is Mars who steps in and takes over. If an increased involvement in Heaven’s Gate results in members’ loved one’s questioning their involvement, then it is the deep-seated sense of alienation (the moon) that is heightened, ameliorated by a severing of ties (Mars). If Gemini speaks to duality or two-ness, Mars is about making that division manifest. 

LEO VENUS IN 9TH 

The 9th House in Hellenistic astrology represents temple work or religious duties, and so for readings of individuals alive today we typically adapt this meaning to describe academic or professional institutions, but here we can really embrace the ancient associations. This is absolutely how the institution of Heaven’s Gate represented itself—transparent, loving, and in loyal service to the good, and to the happiness of its members. The “gate” itself feels as if it refers to a 9th house structure (thinking of heaven elsewhere described as a “kingdom”), with Venus at the threshold guiding members toward an embrace of institutional values. I haven’t looked at the charts for Ti and Do, but it feels significant that they are “the Two”—a platonic pair whose relationship forms the wellspring of the movement, which feels very Venusian. We might place The Lovers card beside the card of The Devil, and see the same figures in both cards. The Lovers’ equivalent in the zodiac, of course, is Gemini. 

VIRGO SUN IN 10th 

If the moon is the id, the sun is the ego—the conscious experience of the self, the path that is chosen, the disposition by which the self feels most connected to worldly perception. The 10th house, “the crown you wear,” positions the ego identity of Heaven’s Gate; what it thinks it is, as a public organization that is meant to efficiently serve its members—to construct and carry out a plan. It is interesting to think of Virgo and Scorpio on either side of Libra, two weights in balance on the scale; this also describes the Persephone myth, in which Virgo descends to the realm of Scorpio and returns with divine knowledge, incurring the changing of the seasons; whose being is intricately tied to the rotation of the earth. Virgo’s responsibility, then, is to bear the fate of the world in their minute actions. Heaven’s Gate in this way positions itself as serving humanity through a practical, incremental system, which relies on everyone “doing their part.” 

SCORPIO URANUS IN 12TH 

To me it is difficult to find more aptly conflated synonyms for death, unless maybe you replace Uranus with Pluto. Uranian matters are dramatic, revolutionary. They speak to transformative change—as does the 12th house, as does Scorpio. This placement imbues Heaven’s Gate with such an inevitability of death, but the kind of death that is cosmically resonant in that it has the power to change how death in this context is understood. This 12th house, “the bottoming out,” feels like a reservoir that feeds into the Sagittarian Neptune, the sediment that must be continuously re-worked or rediscovered in whatever form it takes in its periods of hibernation. Neptune in Sagittarius may represent the fossilization process of Uranus in Scorpio. I may have more to say about this once I finish the documentary, but I am looking forward to watching for impressions of how “death” is constructed, or re-made as an artifact of social, extraterrestrial liberation.