The Sky Within

 

Planet	Sign	Position	House		House Cusps
Sun	Capricorn	21°Cp33'	12th		01  00°Aq57'
Moon	Pisces	23°Pi25'	02nd		02  15°Pi02'
Mercury	Capricorn	01°Cp55' R	11th		03  23°Ar18'
Venus	Aquarius	05°Aq53'	01st		04  21°Ta39'
Mars	Aquarius	22°Aq09'	01st		05  14°Ge25'
Jupiter	Pisces	06°Pi57'	01st		06  05°Ca55'
Saturn	Libra	02°Li22' R	08th		07  00°Le57'
Uranus	Cancer	06°Ca52' R	06th		08  15°Vi02'
Neptune	Libra	19°Li31'	08th		09  23°Li18'
Pluto	Leo	19°Le16' R	07th		10  21°Sc39'
Midheaven	Scorpio	21°Sc39'	10th		11  14°Sg25'
Ascendant	Aquarius	00°Aq57'	01st		12  05°Cp55'

  

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 Capricorn.

Tell the truth about Capricorn and you start sounding like a voice out of the Boy Scout Handbook.  Here are the key concepts: integrity,  character,  morality,  a sense of personal honor.  Those are the Sea-Goat's evolutionary themes.  They all boil down to the capacity of will to dominate every other aspect of our natures, including emotion.

The Capricornian part of you needs to begin by asking itself one critical question: In the part of my life touched by the Sea-Goat, what is the highest truth I know?  The rest is simple... at least simple to understand.  Just live it.  Keep a stiff upper lip, and do what's right.

But be careful.  There's nothing wrong with expressing feelings as long as they're not doing your decision-making for you.  If you're tempted to do something wicked, don't be afraid to mention it.  Otherwise, half the world will think you're a saint while the other half thinks you're a pompous ass.  And neither half will get within a light-year of your human heart.

With your Sun in Capricorn, you feed your elemental vitality through one all-consuming activity: the accomplishment of Great Works.  They may be public -- like building a career that reflects the best of what you are -- or they may be private, like quietly doing what's right for yourself regardless of social or practical pressures.

Capricorn is the sign of the Hermit, and accordingly, there is a theme of solitude in your life.  That doesn't mean loneliness.  The Sea-goat's solitude has more to do with self-sufficiency and privacy.  It's certainly healthy for you to love; it's neediness on your part that leads inevitably toward frustrating emotional isolation.

You're a survivor, an endurer.  Those are fine qualities, and when life is hard, you'll shine.  Careful you don't use them inappropriately: when you're sad or frightened, express it.  Otherwise, you put yourself in pointless emotional exile.

We can take our analysis of your natal Sun a step further. When you were born, that solar light illuminated the Twelfth 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.

Slipping the bonds of ego, letting consciousness expand beyond the narrow framework of personality -- that's the terrain of the Twelfth House.  A planet here stands between you and higher states of consciousness, not as an obstacle but as a bridge.  For that reason, it's helpful to view such a planet as your "Guru" or "Master Teacher."

The very existence of a planet in this part of your chart tells us that in this lifetime you're ready for a quantum leap in awareness.  But to accomplish that, you must practice a very specific "yoga."  What yoga?  That depends on the planets involved.

Before we identify that spiritual discipline, there's one more point -- your planetary "guru" is rather insistent.  If you avoid the methods the Teacher suggests, your poor ego will take some hard knocks.  To the old astrologers, this was the "House of Troubles."  That's a fair description of what's in store for us if we choose to maintain our usual attachments, ignoring the call of the inner worlds.

With the Sun in the Twelfth House, you're learning about nonattachment.  That doesn't necessarily mean poverty, celibacy, and a begging bowl -- those can be attachments too!  Nonattachment means being willing to let go of anything, anytime.  It means recognizing that you're not simply a personality, you're a consciousness, something deeper than all your postures or possessions.  It means putting your inner life on the front burner all the time.  Nonattachment, then, is an inner attitude, not an outward condition.

When you fail to maintain that lofty state, "bad luck" will intervene: the thing you're stuck on will be taken from you.  That's why, centuries ago, astrologers named this sector of the birthchart the House of Troubles.  What they forgot to add is that the troubles are optional.

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 Second house of your chart.

Traditionally, the Second House is the House of Money.  That's true, but the issues here are much broader.  This is the House of Resources, and resources aren't always financial.  If you're lost in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, at two in the morning, you'll probably feel pretty insecure.  If you have a thousand dollars in your pocket, that'll help; you'll feel more legitimate.  The money is a resource, and it produces the classic Second House effect: helping you feel more confident. But speaking fluent Serbo-Croatian would do the same; knowing the language is a terrific resource, even though no one will give you a nickel for it.

Your Second House energies feel awkward, as if everyone is staring at them.  Dignity and self-esteem are the issues here.  The solution isn't some "We all God's chillin'" formula for uncritical self-love.  Instead, it's a process of recognizing your deficiencies objectively and seeking to correct them: proving yourself to yourself, in other words.

With the Moon in the Second House, feeling confidence in yourself does not come automatically; you've had to work at it.  How?  A lot depends on what we just learned a few seconds ago -- the activities connected with the sign your Moon occupies play a terrific role in helping you feel worthy of the good things in life.  Add to that formula the classic lunar strategy: nurturing.  If you find something -- a person, an animal, an institution -- that's wounded in some way and you manage to bring it back from the brink of disaster, you're feeding your Moon and thereby deepening your elemental dignity.  The pitfall, of course, lies in not letting go of the thing you're healing even after it's well.  Avoid that, and you'll be fine.

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, Aquarius was lifting over the eastern horizon of Cape Girardeau,Misso. Let's begin our analysis by considering the meaning and spiritual message of the sign of "The Genius".

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 Aquarius rising, you radiate independence and individuality.  From the moment they meet you, it's clear to people that you intend to be yourself.  You may appreciate it if they accept you, but you won't become a dancing monkey to win their approval.  That, at least, is how you look when you're healthy.  There's another side to the coin.  If you succumb to social pressure and take on more conventionality than is natural to you, then your style will shift: instead of a delightful uniqueness, even zaniness, we'll see an aloofness, as though you're holding something back.  And of course you are, at least in that scenario -- you're holding back yourself.

To feel centered and clear about who you are, you need to feed yourself a set of experiences that lie outside the social mainstream.  Basically, a lot of the things that are good for you look rather strange to average people.

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 Capricorn with the Moon in Pisces and Aquarius 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 Authority", or "The Prime Minister", or "The Boss". Those are just different ways of saying you have the Sun in Capricorn.

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 Genius", or "The Truth-Sayer", or "The Exile". Those images capture the spirit of your Ascendant, which is Aquarius.

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.

We find exactly that situation in your case. Venus lies in your First House, a part of the chart which is really just an extension of the Ascendant. Thus, Venus adds yet another tone to your "mask," modifying and deepening some of what we've already seen.

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 Aquarius. Thus, both your aesthetic sensitivity and your taste in partners is shaped by the innovative, rule-smashing spirit of the Exile. In the realm of beauty, whether natural or wrought by human hands, you have a taste for the unexpected, for the shocking -- and a corresponding contempt for hackneyed themes. The same goes for friends and sexual partners -- you appreciate independent individuals with spunk and novel perspectives, people who are willing to let you be yourself without fear of knee-jerk criticism.

With Venus in the First House, you are blessed with a kind of animal magnetism. People seem instantly to trust you, to feel as though there's rapport between you. You are instinctively courteous -- that is, you mold your behavior in such a way that others are put at ease. From an evolutionary perspective, you center yourself most effectively when you identify yourself as a peacemaker or an artist.

There's even more going on in this part of your birthchart. Also found here are Mars and Jupiter.

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 scrapping in Aquarius. This combination ties the belligerent, competitive energy of the Warrior to the independent, iconoclastic spirit of the Genius or the Exile. The result is that an instinct to question and challenge authority is woven into the logic of your psyche. Something in you cannot abide a boss! Spiritually you are learning about the loneliness and social ostracism that so often are the price of a passionate dedication to truth.

With the War-God occupying your First House, people's first impression of you is that you're a rather daunting individual, strong-willed, and one with whom nobody trifles. There's a presence, a passion, an intensity about your "persona," perhaps more so than you know. From an evolutionary perspective, you center yourself most effectively when you willingly, actively, face your primal fears. Scared of heights? Then learn to sky-dive.

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 Pisces. 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 Dreams. That is, you restore yourself by sitting quietly, getting out of your own way, and just dissolving into that vast, shining space between your ears. For you, happiness is a natural state; when you're sad it's probably at least partly because you've allowed yourself to get overextended, too caught up in the worldly chase. So stop. Breathe. And feel bliss.

In your chart, the "King of the Gods" reigns in the First House -- traditionally the "House of the Self." A bright, positive, expansive quality radiates from you... even when you're feeling rotten. In the old days, astrologers viewed a first House Jupiter as lucky. There's some truth to that, in that you usually end up getting what you want. But spiritually you're learning that fulfilling desires, especially flashy "Hollywood" desires, doesn't always deliver the advertised bliss.

Your birthchart displays another area of heightened activity: the Eighth House. The reason for that is simple -- there's a lot of planetary activity. With Saturn and Neptune 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.

In the Eighth House you experience three basic human instincts in a radically heightened way. The first instinct is sexual -- not simply having intercourse, but also allowing yourself to bond fully with a partner, letting the primal sexual "program" in your deep psyche manifest, riding the roller coaster, trusting it, even though noÿone can completely understand it.

Death is the second Eighth House instinct. Again, we let ourselves flow with something deep within us, learning consciously something that our cells know automatically -- that death, like sex, is just another biological roller coaster, spooky maybe, but worthy of trust... which leads directly to the third instinct: our sense of immortality. Something deep and trans-rational in us knows there is a realm beyond death. Life has an "occult" dimension -- that is, a hidden one. Without an acceptance of that intuitive feeling, we live forever under a shadow of futility and foreboding.

You have lessons here. Let's consider them.

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 graceful terrain of Libra 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 Scales' shadow side: indecision and people-pleasing. Sometimes bridges must be crossed -- or burned. Will yourself toward commitment! This is especially pertinent in regard to the affairs of Saturn's House in your birthchart. Which House was that?

The Eighth! The arena of life where you face the Unconscious, and all the half-taboo energies that lie there: your sexuality, your sense of mortality, and your instincts about "other dimensions." With Saturn here, your Eighth House passions are so strong they probably frighten you a bit. Concentrate on conquering that fear and extending yourself step by step into those mysterious realms. Otherwise, your intimate life will be frustrating, death will haunt you, and there will be a big hole in your life where magic should be.

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 Libra. Thus, to trigger higher states of consciousness in yourself and to stimulate your psychic development, you may choose to follow the Path of the Lover... that is consciously, intentionally to seek life partners who'll hold the mirror of the soul before you. Without the purifying, soul-bleaching effects of dialog with these soulmates, you tend to drift away from Spirit, losing yourself in the mazes of daily life. But remember: finding them usually isn't the challenge. The challenge lies in hanging in there with them, listening and learning, even when you don't like what's reflected in the "soul mirror."

Neptune, planet of transcendence, occupies the Eighth House of your birthchart, where mystical dimensions permeate your experience of the instinctive realms of consciousness. There is a powerful "occult" element in your psychic matrix. That doesn't mean witchcraft, at least not in the evil sense. Rather, it indicates a native capacity for healing, for working with symbols, and for interpreting dreams. To trigger these skills fully, you benefit enormously from establishing a sexual relationship with someone who understands sex as more than pleasure and affection....

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.

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 Cancer, the process of individuation for you is tied up with the Path of the Inner Eye. That is to say, you strengthen and clarify your own Uranian identity through two kinds of exploration. One is the stimulation and investigation of your own fertile creative imagination. The other revolves around a sensitive, probing consideration of the way the "myth" of your family has shaped -- and limited -- the development of your character.

House of Servants -- that's the old name for the Sixth House, where your Uranus lies. The issues are broader; not just work, but also the spiritual virtues that arise from work --  competence, responsibility, caring, and humility. Uranus is your Teacher here, and the lesson can be summarized this way: the kinds of work that afford you the deepest sense of satisfaction are Uranian--that is, they are unorthodox... a conservative person might call them "weird." You are happiest in patterns of work and responsibility in which there's plenty of room for experimentation, individuality, and invention -- and saddest when the boss is breathing down your shoulder.

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 cogitating in Capricorn. This combination links your mental functions to the orderly, winter-clear logic of the Sea-Goat. Reflexively, you make sense of information, detecting patterns, uncovering the webwork of rational principles that underlie the apparent chaos of life. You have an instinct for precision and clarity. Spiritually you are learning about the overriding necessity for mental discipline... and the grace of not imposing it upon unwilling audiences.

With the traditional "Messenger of the Gods" occupying your Eleventh House, as you mature, your Mercury energies play an increasingly central role in your nature and circumstances. That means that if you play your cards right, you'll move in the direction of becoming a "voice" in your community, one who puts into words the needs, fears, and perceptions of your "tribe."

"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 Seventh House... the part of the natal chart concerned with intimacy. Your soulmates will, at times, push you toward your emotional limits. That may be exhausting, but anyone who isn't capable of that kind of intensity won't hold your attention or interest for very long. Through those relationships you are learning -- sometimes the hard way -- many truths about human partnership. Your transpersonal mission ultimately revolves around sharing those insights.

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 Virgo, the sign of the Servant. Anyone looking into your eyes as you took your first breath would have observed the results of lifetimes spent learning the virtues of artistry: attention to detail, devotion to perfection, respect for method. In previous incarnations, you've attained excellence at some skill which other people valued. Through logging so many hours exercising that skill, you became radically and narrowly identified with it. Now, like a baker who's seen one too many loaves of bread, you must learn a new lesson: how to relax, stop "earning love," and simply open your easy heart.

That nascent ability to simply accept love is symbolized by your North Node of the Moon, which lies in Pisces -- the sign of the Mystic. As we saw earlier, the North Node can be seen as the most significant point in the entire birthchart. Why? Because it represents your evolutionary future... the ultimate reason you're alive, in other words. How can you accomplish this Piscean spiritual work? The "yoga" is easy to say, harder to do: you must overcome your dutiful, methodical, somewhat self-critical instincts and consciously, through meditation, open yourself to a love so infinite and unconditional that nothing you can do can effect it at all. You might practice by letting others offer you kindness without succumbing to an ancient little voice inside you that says, "Oh damn, now I owe them one!"

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.