The Sky Within

 

 

Planet	Sign	Position	House		House Cusps
Sun	Aquarius	10°Aq48'	06th		01  02°Vi55'
Moon	Pisces	22°Pi40'	07th		02  26°Vi16'
Mercury	Aquarius	24°Aq15'	06th		03  24°Li45'
Venus	Capricorn	21°Cp27'	05th		04  27°Sc59'
Mars	Sagittarius	17°Sg46'	04th		05  02°Cp47'
Jupiter	Taurus	07°Ta17'	09th		06  04°Aq55'
Saturn	Taurus	08°Ta19'	09th		07  02°Pi55'
Uranus	Taurus	22°Ta09'	09th		08  26°Pi16'
Neptune	Virgo	27°Vi25' R	02nd		09  24°Ar45'
Pluto	Leo	03°Le02' R	11th		10  27°Ta59'
Midheaven	Taurus	27°Ta59'	10th		11  02°Ca47'
Ascendant	Virgo	02°Vi55'	01st		12  04°Le55'

 

 

 

 

THE SKY WITHIN

by Steven Forrest

Using Your Birthchart as a Spiritual Guide

A woman has a baby and is blissful about it. Another one does the same, and spends the rest of her life dreaming about how she might have been a ballerina. The same choice: having a kid. But only one smiling woman.

Nobody has a generic formula for happiness, at least not one that does the trick for everyone. That's where astrology comes in.

The birthchart, stripped to bare bones, is simply a description of the happiest, most fulfilling life that's available to you... personally. It spells out a set of strategies you can use to avoid boring routines, bad choices, and dead ends. It lists your resources. And it talks about how your life looks when you're misusing the resources and distorting the strategies -- shooting yourself in the foot, in other words.

All from a map of the sky?

Hard to believe. But think for a minute...

"How can the planets possibly affect us? They're millions of miles away." Astrology's critics are fond of rolling out that argument. But it doesn't hold water. Go out and gaze at the moon. What's really happening? Incomprehensible energies are plunging across a quarter million miles of void, crashing through your eyeballs and creating electrochemical changes in your brain. We call the process "seeing the moon." Certainly the planets affect us. The question is where do we draw the boundaries around those effects?

Let's go a step further.

Open your eyes on a starry night. What do you see? A vast, luminous space, full of shadows and light. Now close your eyes so tight they ache. Where are you now? What do you see? Again, a vast, luminous space, full of shadows and light. Consciousness and cosmos are structured around the same laws, follow the same patterns, and even feel pretty much the same to our senses.

"As above, so below." Just as the starry night awes us with its vastness, there's something infinitely deep inside you, a place you go when you close your eyes, a place that's beyond being an Aries or a Gemini or even a specific gender. At the most profound level, a birthchart is a map back to that magical center. It describes a series of earthly experiences which, if you're brave and open enough, will trigger certain states of consciousness in you -- states that operate like powerful spiritual catalysts, vaulting you into higher levels of being.

In the pages that follow, you'll tour your personal birthchart. But don't expect the usual "Scorpios are sexy" stuff. You are a mysterious being in a mysterious cosmos. You're here for just a little while, a blink of God's eye. You face a monumental task: figuring out what's going on! In that spiritual work, astrology is your ally. How will it help?

Certainly not by pigeon-holing you as a certain "type."

Astrology works by reminding you who you are, by warning you about the comforting lies we all tell ourselves, and by illuminating the experiences that trigger your most explosive leaps in awareness.

After that, the rest is up to you.

 

YOUR TEN TEACHERS

Freud divided the human mind into three compartments: ego, id, and superego. Astrologers do the same thing, except that our model of the mind differs from Freud's in two fundamental ways. First, it's a lot more elaborate. Instead of three compartments, we have ten: Sun, Moon, and the eight planets we see from Earth. As we'll discover, each planet represents more than a "circuit" in your psyche. It also serves as a kind of "Teacher," guiding you into certain consciousness-triggering kinds of experience.

The second difference between astrology and psychology is that astrology's mind-map, unlike Freud's, is rooted in nature itself, just as we are.

The primary celestial teacher is the Sun. What does it teach? Selfhood. Vitality. How to keep the life-force strong in yourself. If the Sun grew dimmer, so would all the planets -- they shine by reflecting solar light. Similarly, if you fail to stoke the furnaces of your own inner Sun, then you'll simply be "out of gas." All your other planetary functions will suffer too.

How do we learn this teacher's lessons?

Start by realizing that when you were born the Sun was in Aquarius.

Aquarius is the sign of geniuses -- and criminals.  It represents Individuation, which is a five-dollar word meaning the process of being yourself.  Set against your individuation are all the social forces of conformity.  Buy a necktie!  Shave your legs!  Get hungry at noon!  Outwardly, they show up as peer pressures.  Inwardly, those forces are more subtle but even more formidable: all the internalized scripts that go with having once been a very little kid learning how to be human from mom, dad, and the television set.

The Aquarian part of you is odd somehow.  It doesn't fit into the social environment, at least not without betraying itself.  In this part of your life, the more centered you get, the weirder you'll seem -- to Ann Landers and her crowd.  Go for it, and pay the price of alienation or ostracism.  It's high... but not as high as the price of living a life that's not your own.

With your Sun in Aquarius, the experiences that feed your solar vitality happen to be ones that most people will think are strange.  There's nothing spiritually dead about "normalcy;" it just happens that you've come to a point in the soul's journey in which the path wanders through the cultural and social fringes.  Don't let that stop you!  Be yourself, even if doing that annoys every figure of authority for miles around.

Society will try to coerce you into living a life that's more mainstream than what's good for you.  It will bribe, threaten, cajole, and intimidate you.  As though that weren't enough, it will send spies inside your fortress-walls: people who love you saying, "Please compromise on this!  It tears me up to think what'll happen to you if you don't!"  They're sincere, but don't let them sway you.  Be yourself.  You're sailing in the thin, high atmosphere of true individuality.  And one of the prices you pay is that, sadly, you'll have to hurt some people to do it.

We can take our analysis of your natal Sun a step further. When you were born, that solar light illuminated the Sixth house. What does that signify?

Start by realizing that Houses represent twelve basic arenas of life. There's a House of Marriage, for example, and a House of Career. Always, we find an element of "fate" in our House structures; the "Hand of God" continually presents us with existential and moral questions connected with our emphasized Houses. How we react and what we learn -- or fail to learn -- is our own business.

One brief technical note: Sometimes the Sun, the Moon, or a planet lies near the end of the House. We then say it's "conjunct the cusp" of the subsequent House, and interpret it as though it were a little further along... in the next House, in other words.

Craft, responsibility, the joy of competence -- that's Sixth House territory.  Traditionally, it's the House of Servants.  The label still works -- provided you recognize that it's not your butlers and chambermaids we're discussing here!  You're the servant, and that's not nearly as bad as it sounds.

There's a myth in our culture that encourages us to believe everyone is automatically depressed on Monday morning, happy on Friday afternoon, ecstatic 'til Sunday around dinner time, then crashes down into the pits again come Monday.  Don't believe it!  With a Teacher in the Sixth House, you've got a good shot at shattering the myth, at least for yourself.  A big part of you likes to work, enjoys being good at something, prefers to be useful.

The trick lies in finding the right crafts, skills, and responsibilities.  Let's let the Teacher speak.

With the Sun in the Sixth House, you're a hard worker, a responsible person who'll keep promises and fulfill contracts.   The trick lies in making sure they're the right promises and the right contracts!  Finding the crafts and skills that express your spirit is perhaps the central challenge of your life.  Dignity and self-respect for you lie squarely in the world of work.  To feel good about yourself, you must achieve excellence.  And that revolves around self-discipline, humility, and locating worthy teachers... and has nothing at all to do with whether you get your face in People magazine!

The next step in our journey through your birthchart carries us to the Moon.

As you might expect, Luna resonates with the magical, emotional sides of your psyche. It represents your mood, averaged over a lifetime. As the heart's teacher, it tells you how to feel comfortable, how to meet your deepest needs. While the Sun lets you know what kinds of experiences and relationships help you feel sane, the Moon is concerned with another piece of the puzzle: feeling happy.

When you were born, the Moon was in Pisces.

Transcendence.  Mysticism.  Spirituality.  That's Pisces at its best.  In this part of your life, you've been given an instinctive sense of mystery and vastness.  Something there seems automatically to think in terms of centuries, of high purposes, of divine interventions.  Reflexively, when faced with life's vicissitudes, it asks, "What will this matter in five hundred years?"

That's the soul of spirituality.  It's also dangerous.  Transcendence can run amuck, leaving Pisces in an uncaring, drifting mode, "transcending" while its life descends into entropy.  Along that road there are some sad waystations: forgetfulness, spaciness, then escapism -- perhaps into alcohol or drugs, perhaps into food, maybe into the television set.

Avoid those sorry journeys by feeding your Piscean circuitry exactly what it needs: meditative time, silence, a few minutes each day to sit in the infinite cathedral.

With your Moon in Pisces, you have an instinctive sense of the presence of Spirit, although you may give it other names and explanations: mystery, higher levels of consciousness, spaciousness.  Call that experience what you will, if you are going to be comfortable in this world, you need to leave it every now and then, allowing yourself to enter a kind of trance... and that process too goes by many names: meditation, prayer, staring out the window.  Sometimes people who enter it call themselves artists seeking creative inspiration.  Other times, they're bird watchers waiting hours for a rare sighting.  Or amateur astronomers gazing at the wispy arms of a faint galaxy.  Or photographers waiting for the dawn light to be exactly right...

If you don't take care of your Moon, you'll find yourself slipping into a lackadaisical state in which nothing motivates you except maybe pain.  That kind of uncaring laziness is not your true nature, but it is the major "occupational hazard" that goes along with this lunar position.

Going farther, we see that your Moon lies in the Seventh house of your chart.

One thing about love -- there's no way to learn much about it without some help!  The Seventh House, traditionally the House of Marriage, is the part of your birthchart where you encounter the people who'll provide your deepest insights into intimacy.  But that's not a code word for sex!  For that reason, "Marriage" is a misleading title for this House.  You can have intimacy without erotic or romantic feelings.

There are two parts to understanding the Seventh House.  The first is that whatever energies you have in this part of your birthchart represent lessons you're learning about empathy, trust, and commitment.  The second is that those same planetary energies describe the people who'll provide the lessons.  They may be mates or lovers.  They may be best friends.  They may be colleagues or business associates.  They may even be "worthy opponents."

With the Moon in the Seventh House, you've shoved the most vulnerable part of your psychological self right into the hornet's nest: the perilous world of intimacy!  You bring tremendous empathy and caring into your love life; you also bring all your wounds and tender places.  For you to feel comfortable, there has to be a lot of subjective "flow" between you and the people with whom you share your life.  For that reason your "soulmates" tend to be emotional folks, full of imagination, in touch with their needs and fears -- and often, therefore, rather moody.  In love, you're riding a roller coaster and that's scarey... but you really wouldn't have it any other way.

There's a third critical piece in your astrological puzzle -- the Ascendant, or rising sign. Along with the Sun and Moon, it completes the "primal triad." What is it? What does it mean? Simple -- the Ascendant is the sign that was coming up over the eastern horizon at the instant of your birth. It's where the sun is at dawn, in other words. In exactly the same way, the Ascendant represents how you "dawn" on people -- that is, how you present yourself. It's your "style," or your "mask."

The ascendant means more than that. It symbolizes a way you can help yourself feel centered, at ease, comfortable with who you are. If you get its message, then something wonderful happens: your style hooks you into the world of experience in a way that feeds your spirit exactly the kinds of events and relationships you need. Your soul is charged with more enthusiasm for the life you're living -- and you feel vibrant, confident, and full of animal grace.

When you took your first breath, Virgo was lifting over the eastern horizon of Lincoln,Nebraska. Let's begin our analysis by considering the meaning and spiritual message of the sign of "The Perfectionist".

Virginity isn't the point.  That's just a kind of inexperience, and in the long run no one learns much from avoiding experience.  Virgo means purity.  Perfection.  Getting everything exactly right.  That's a tall order.  Perfection is a harsh master.  It drives the Virgoan part of you, haunting you with a sense of what could be, a sense of the ideal.  It also holds a flawless mirror before you, revealing all the imperfections and shortfalls in your character.  The combination is powerful.  It fills your spirit with hunger and divine discontent, imbueing you with restlessness, as though you'd taken out an insurance policy against complacency.  Be careful, though: Virgo energies can self-destruct, slipping into a crippling hyper-awareness regarding all the flaws and shortfalls inherent in people, oneself, our possessions, our prospects -- everything.  And nothing kills our climb toward perfection faster than that.

With Virgo rising, your style is precise and analytical.  You radiate intelligence, sometimes rather intimidatingly.  Something in your aura seems to be studying everything -- and everyone! -- searching for errors and weaknesses.  And of course, you usually find them.  That's fine, but you may need to cultivate a little diplomacy in the way you express what you've discovered.

To feel centered, you need to feel as though you're good at something.  Technical skill bolsters your confidence and your general feeling of well-being immeasurably.  That skill can be in any category, from figure-skating to neurosurgery.  Similarly, you'll feel best when you're working and when the work you're doing is clearly helping someone in a practical way.

What have we learned so far? Quite a lot. Astrologers use the primal triad of Sun, Moon, and Ascendant in much the same way people who know just a little astrology use Sun signs. The difference is that while there are only twelve Sun signs, there are 1728 different combinations of all three factors. So when we say that you are a Aquarius with the Moon in Pisces and Virgo rising, that's a very specific statement.

Here's a way to make those words come even more alive. Traditionally, signs are connected with Bulls and Sea-Goats and Scorpions -- creatures we don't see every day. But we can translate those images into more modern archetypes.

We can say you are "The Genius", or "The Truth-Sayer", or "The Exile". Those are just different ways of saying you have the Sun in Aquarius.

We can say you have the soul of "The Mystic", or "The Poet", or "The Dreamer"... your Moon lies in Pisces, in other words.

We can add that you wear the mask of "The Perfectionist", or "The Analyst", or "The Servant". Those images capture the spirit of your Ascendant, which is Virgo.

You can combine those archetypes any way you want. And you can go further: Once you have a feel for the three basic signs in your primal triad, you can make up your own images to go with them. Whatever words you choose, those simple statements are your fundamental astrological signature. It's your skeleton. Our next step is to begin adding flesh and hair to that skeleton by considering the planets.

 

Unsurprisingly, planets can gain prominence in a birthchart through association with the Sun, Moon, or Ascendant. These three are power brokers, and any linkage with them boosts a planet's influence.

Sometimes a planet gains prominence in a birthchart simply by sharing a House with the Sun. That's the case with you. Mercury is bathing in solar light, occupying the Sixth House along with our central star.

Mercury buzzes around the Sun in eighty-eight days, making it the fastest of the planets. It buzzes around your head in exactly the same way: frantically. It's the part of you that never rests -- the endless firing of your synapses as your intelligence struggles to organize a picture of the world. Mercury represents thinking and speaking, learning and wondering. It is the great observer, always curious. It represents your senses themselves and all the raw, undigested data that pours through them.

Mercury is chafing in Aquarius. This combination links your mental functions with the rebellious, authority-questioning logic of the Exile archetype. Reflexively, your intelligence rebels against conformity, against the blind stupidity of the herd. Spiritually you are learning about the electric shock of genius -- and about its loneliness.

With the traditional "Messenger of the Gods" occupying your Sixth House, you're happiest when you're "talking for a living," although "thinking for a living" is a close second. Any kind of work or responsibilities that don't leave plenty of room for innovative thought fail to feed your Mercury... and then you get Mercury "diseases" like nervousness and chatter -- or compulsive job-changing.

Your birthchart displays another area of heightened activity: the Ninth House. The reason for that is simple -- there's a lot of planetary activity. With Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus in that area of your life, it is charged with activity, soul lessons, and opportunities for personal development. Before we even consider the planets separately, our first step is to explore this piece of existential real estate in broad terms.

The House of Long Journeys over Water -- that's one old name for this part of the birthchart.  Since you have energy focused here a fortune-teller would say, "I see travel in your stars."  True enough, although a deeper way of expressing the same notion is that immersing yourself in cultures outside the one into which you were born is a pivotal spiritual catalyst for you.

There are other kinds of catalytic journeys.  Getting a wide education, formally or informally, is one.  So is anything that breaks up the normal routines of life and thought.  Even learning to hang-glide.

Ultimately, in the Ninth House you weave a grand scheme of life's meaning and purpose, at least your own version of it.  This is the House of Religion... provided we recognize that many major world religions have no churches or temples.  Cynicism is one such religion.  Existentialism, Materialism, and Science are others, not to mention Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism and so on.

Take all the planets, all the meteors, moons, asteroids, and comets. Roll them up in a big ball of cosmic mush. They still wouldn't equal the mass of the "King of the Gods" -- Jupiter. Exactly that same bigness pervades the planet's astrological spirit. Jupiter is the symbol of buoyancy and generosity, of opportunity and joy. At the deepest level, it represents faith... faith in life, that is, rather than faith in anybody's theological position papers.

Jupiter stands in Taurus. This is an important piece of information -- maybe a pivotal one. Being human is tough sometimes. When you need to boost your elemental faith in life, your answer lies in following the Way of the Earth Spirit. In other words, you need to go recharge your batteries by sitting quietly in the woods or digging in your garden or curling up with your cat. Anything earthy and simple will do.

In your chart, the "King of the Gods" reigns in the Ninth House -- traditionally the "House of Long Journeys." To maintain your faith in life, you need travel. Developing enough self-love to justify investing in yourself in that department is a spiritual lesson for you. The same goes for education, and any other experience that expands your horizons. Trust yourself, trust life, get out your VISA card if necessary, and leap in!

Look at a NASA photo of Saturn. The icy elegance of the planet's rings, the pale understatement of the cloud bands... both hint at the clarity and precision which characterize Saturn's astrological spirit. Part of the human psyche must be cold and calculating, cunning enough to survive in the physical world. Part of us thrives on self-discipline, seeks excellence, pays the price of devotion. Somewhere in our lives there's a region where nothing but the best of what we are is enough to satisfy us. That's the high realm of Saturn. In its low realm, we take one glance at those challenges and our hearts turn to ice. We freeze in fear, and despair claims us.

The earthy terrain of Taurus offers a region of profound spiritual challenge for you, as Saturn was passing through that sign at your birth. You must learn to steel yourself in the face of the Bull's shadow side: spirit-numbing predictability. Will yourself toward openness! Throw a monkey wrench into your efficient systems! This is especially healing -- and challenging -- in the context of Saturn's House in your birthchart. Which House was that?

The Ninth! The arena of life where we break up routines, stretching our mental horizons with travel, education, and dizzy new perspectives. With Saturn here, plan your escape as though you were a prisoner plotting a jailbreak. What are you escaping? Yourself, basically. Or at least the unnatural limits you've placed on yourself. Overcome resistance and "practicality." There's an expedition in your destiny pattern, a pilgrimage. Accept it.

If Uranus were the only planet in the sky, we'd all be so independent we'd still be Neanderthals throwing rocks at each other. There would be no language, no culture, no law. On the other hand, if Uranus did not exist, we'd all still be hauling rocks for Pharaoh. All individuality would be suppressed. This is the planet of individuation... the process whereby we separate out who we are from what everybody else wants us to be. Always it indicates an area of our lives in which, to be true to ourselves, we must "break the rules" -- that is, overcome the forces of socialization and peer pressure. In that part of our experience, what feeds our souls tends to annoy mom and dad... and all the "moms" and "dads" who lay down the law of the tribe.

With Uranus in Taurus, the process of individuation for you is tied up with the Path of the Earth Spirit. That is to say, you strengthen and clarify your own Uranian identity through deepening your bond with nature -- and without that you're likely to clog up your life with unnecessary conservatism. Consciously chosen forays into the natural world, such as hiking, gardening, or close association with animals, purify your sense of self, purging out the spurious "inner voices" you've swallowed sitting in front of the great wraparound television set of late twentieth century Industrial Culture.

House of Journeys -- that's the old name for the Ninth House, where your Uranus lies. The issues are broader; not just travel, but the whole process of extending our experiential frontiers. Uranus is your Teacher here and the lessons can be summarized this way: to find your true individuality, you must undertake a quest. That quest probably contains an element of travel -- the mythical journey "to seek your fortune." But it also involves a broad process of learning and stretching your philosophical views.

In the final analysis, all planets are important. Each one plays a unique role in your developmental pattern, and failure to feed any one of them results in a diminution of your life. Just because the following planets aren't "having breakfast with the President" through association with the Sun, Moon, or Ascendant doesn't mean we can ignore them.

You're lying in your bed, going to sleep. Suddenly a jolt runs through your body. You just "caught yourself falling asleep." Where were you two seconds before the jolt? What were you? Astrologically, the answer lies with Neptune. This is the planet of trance, of meditation, of dreams. It represents your doorway into the "Not-Self." Based on the sign the planet occupies, we identify a particularly critical spiritual catalyst for you... although we need to remember that Neptune remains in a Sign for an average of a little over thirteen years, so its Sign position actually describes not only you, but your whole generation. Its House position, however, is more uniquely your own.

Neptune was passing through Virgo. Thus, to trigger higher states of consciousness in yourself and to stimulate your psychic development, you may choose to follow the Path of the Servant... that is consciously, intentionally to seek the perfection of those skills and virtues in yourself which benefit others. Without exposure to the purifying, soul-bleaching effects of selfless service, you tend to drift away from Spirit, losing yourself in the mazes of daily life -- or in the subtle ego-traps of meditation.

Neptune, planet of transcendence, occupies the Second House of your birthchart, where its mystical feelings are linked to questions of self-esteem and dignity. To feel good about yourself, to avoid the pitfalls of self-limitation, you need a spiritual framework for your life... a sense of divine purpose. Why? Because mere ego-fulfillment is never inspiring enough to motivate you in the long run, and without inspiration, you won't do anything!

Pale red Mars suggested blood to our ancestors, and they named it the War God. That's an effective metaphor -- Mars does represent violence. But today we go further. The red planet symbolizes the power of the Will. Assertiveness. Courage. Without it, there'd be no fire in life. No spark. Where your Mars lies, you are challenged to find the Spiritual Warrior inside yourself, the part of you that's brave and clear enough to claim your own path and follow it.

Mars is stretching for the stars in Sagittarius. You have a passionate instinct for adventure, for anything novel, foreign, or unfamiliar. When confined or restrained, you're explosive. Some of your deepest and most unsettling spiritual lessons revolve around recognizing the way we humans -- you included -- tend to sell our freedom cheaply, trading it for security or status before we've recognized the horror of what we're doing. Avoid that! For you, it's a road to terrible hurt.

With the War-God occupying your Fourth House, there's fire buried deep inside you. When we strip away the layers of your psychological onion and bare the core, we find the Warrior or the Crusader or the Adventurer--passion, in other words. From an evolutionary perspective, it is essential that you express those qualities behaviorally, or they'll back up inside you, turning to seething anger and eventually into depression.

"Life's a bitch. Then you die." Go to any boutique from coast to coast; you'll find those words on a coffee mug. Meaninglessness. Like most truly frightening ideas, we make a joke of it. That's Plutonian territory: the realm of all that terrifies us so badly we need to hide from it. Death. Disease. Our personal shame. Sexuality, to some extent. Initially, Pluto asks us to face our own wounds, squarely and honestly. Then, if we succeed, it offers us a way to create an unshakable sense of meaning in our lives. How? Methods vary according to the Signs and Houses involved, but always they have one point in common: the high Plutonian path invariably involves accepting some trans-personal purpose in your life.

One more point: Pluto moves so slowly that it remains in a given Sign for many years. As result, its Sign position in your birthchart refers not only to you but also to your generation. The House position, however, is much more personal in its relevance.

Pluto was journeying slowly through the sign Leo. Thus the shadow material you are called upon to face has to do with the dark side of the Performer archetype: an obsession with being noticed. In what part of your life or personal history have you chosen style over substance, glitz over moral excellence? (If your answer is "Nowhere!" then congratulations... you're Enlightened... or not looking hard enough.)

At the moment of your birth, Pluto gleamed in the Eleventh House -- the part of the natal chart that refers to your future and to the evolutionary flow of your life. You were born under a Plutonian pattern that suggests you'll be affecting the myths and symbols of your community in a significant way... but not until you have some "credibility lines" on your face! The first half of your life is best understood as preamble. One more piece of the puzzle: that transpersonal mission is not something you can accomplish alone. You must operate as the catalyst in the context of a group.

Venus is the part of your mental circuitry that's concerned with releasing tension and maintaining harmony. Its focus is always peace, inwardly and outwardly. As such, it represents your aesthetic functions -- your taste in colors, sounds, and forms. Why? Because the perception of beauty soothes the human heart. Venus is also tied to your affiliative functions -- your romantic instincts, your sense of courtesy or diplomacy, your taste in friends. Invariably, this planet has one goal: sustaining your serenity in the face of life's onslaughts.

Venus was passing through Capricorn. Thus, both your aesthetic sensitivity and your taste in partners is shaped by the stoic, austere spirit of the Lord of Winter. In the realm of beauty, whether natural or wrought by human hands, you have a taste for the spare and functional, for the sun-bleached purity of windblown rock. The same goes for friends and sexual partners -- you appreciate quiet individuals with character and integrity, and when you make a promise to them, you keep it... and expect the same.

With Venus in the Fifth House, there's an aura of convivial refinement that radiates from you in any social situation. You have the delightful capacity of helping people feel good about themselves, and therefore more spontaneous, natural, and forthcoming. It's deeply important that you find some kind of avenue for the expression of your considerable aesthetic sensibilities -- dancing, playing the flute, painting.

 

Your Lunar Nodes

The soul's journey

Here's a jolly baby. Here's a serious one. An alert one. A dull one. A wise one. Those are common nursery room observations, but they raise a fascinating question: How did that person get in there?

Most of our psychological theory, either technically or in folklore, is developmental theory... abuse a child and he'll grow up to be a child-abuser, for example. But in the eyes of the newborn infant, there is already character. How can that be? One might say it's heredity, and that's certainly at least part of the answer. A large part of the world's population would call it reincarnation -- that baby, for better or worse, represents the culmination of centuries of soul-development in many different bodies. A Fundamentalist might simply announce, "That's how God made the baby." Who's to say? But all three explanations hold one point in common: They all agree that we cannot account for what we observe in a baby's eyes without acknowledging the impact of events occurring before the child's birth.

In astrology, the South Node of the Moon refers to events occurring before your birth, helping us to see what was in your eyes ten seconds after you were born... however we imagine it got in there! The Moon's North Node, always opposite the South Node, refers to your evolutionary future. It's a subtle point, but arguably the most important symbol in astrology. The North Node represents an alien state of consciousness and an unaccustomed set of circumstances. If you open your heart and mind to them, you put maximum tension on the deadening hold of the past.

As we consider the Nodes of the Moon in your birthchart, we'll be using the language of reincarnation. Whether that notion fits your own spiritual beliefs is of course your own business. If it doesn't work for you, please translate the ideas into ancestral hereditary terms. After all, it makes little practical difference whether we speak of a certain farmer weeding his beans a thousand years before the Caesars as your great, great, mega-great grandfather... or as you yourself in a previous incarnation. Either way, he's someone who lived way back there in history who sort of is you, sort of isn't, and lives on inside you--influencing but not ultimately defining you.

At your birth, the South Node of the Moon lay in Aries, the sign of the Warrior. Anyone looking into your eyes as you took your first breath would have observed the results of lifetimes spent learning the ways of courage: alertness, presence, a certain edginess. You've grown strong, tempered by the stress of countless battles, but now, like a Viet Nam vet who throws a knife through the wall when a car backfires down the street, you must learn a new lesson: the war is over.

That nascent ability to release the accumulated tensions and defenses appropriate to battle is symbolized by your North Node of the Moon, which lies in Libra -- the sign of the Balance. As we saw earlier, the North Node can be viewed as the most important point in the birthchart. Why? Because it represents your evolutionary future ... the ultimate reason you're alive, in other words. How can you accomplish this Libran spiritual work? The "yoga" is easy to say, harder to do: you must temper some of your tough independence, consciously letting go of your winner/loser instincts and your hunter/prey reflexes. To attune yourself to this gentle Libran energy, it helps to immerse yourself in the enjoyment of art and nature's beauty, and also to put yourself in positions in which you must interact trustingly with friends and partners.

There's another piece to the puzzle: The Moon's South Node falls in the Eighth House of your chart. This implies that previous to this lifetime you learned a lot about realms of human experience that are often labeled "taboo." You've lived passionately, motivated by intense emotions, especially sexual ones. There's an even chance that long ago you had some training in what we might call magic or shamanism. The dark element in all this is that your spirit has become too heavy, too brooding, for its own good.

In this lifetime, with your North Node of the Moon in the Second House, you must act to counterbalance some of those old passions... not so much because they're "bad" as because you've already learned everything you can from them. The time has come for you to take refuge in a more "normal" kind of life, calming and easing yourself with stability, simplicity, and a reverence for the ordinary.

 

And that's your birth chart.

Trust it; the symbols are Spirit's message to you. In the course of a lifetime, you'll make a billion choices. Any one of them could potentially hurt you terribly, sending you down a barren road. How can you steer a true course? The answer is so profound that it circles around and sounds trivial: listen to your heart, be true to your soul. Noble words and accurate ones, but tough to follow.

The Universe, in its primal intelligence, seems to understand that difficulty. It supplies us with many external supports: Inspiring religions and philosophies. Dear friends who hold the mirror of truth before us. Omens of a thousand kinds. And, above all, the sky itself, which weaves its cryptic message above each newborn infant.

In these pages, you've experienced one reading of that celestial message as it pertains to you. There are others. You may want to consider sitting with a real astrologer ... micro-chips are fine, but a human heart can still express nuances of meaning that no computer can grasp. You may want to order other reports, ones that illuminate your current astrological "weather," or that analyze important relationships. Best of all, you may choose to learn this ancient language yourself, and begin unraveling your own message in your own words.

Whatever your course, we thank you for your time and attention, and wish you grace for your journey.