The Sky Within

 

 

Planet	Sign	Position	House		House Cusps
Sun	Taurus	03°Ta26'	11th		01  26°Ge57'
Moon	Pisces	18°Pi06'	10th		02  16°Ca30'
Mercury	Taurus	01°Ta51'	11th		03  06°Le28'
Venus	Aries	18°Ar02'	11th		04  00°Vi39'
Mars	Taurus	19°Ta19'	12th		05  03°Li25'
Jupiter	Leo	25°Le50'	03rd		06  16°Sc02'
Saturn	Aries	17°Ar40'	11th		07  26°Sg57'
Uranus	Virgo	25°Vi44' R	04th		08  16°Cp30'
Neptune	Scorpio	25°Sc45' R	06th		09  06°Aq28'
Pluto	Virgo	20°Vi32' R	04th		10  00°Pi39'
Midheaven	Pisces	00°Pi39'	10th		11  03°Ar25'
Ascendant	Gemini	26°Ge57'	01st		12  16°Ta02'

 

 

 

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 Taurus.

Ease, calm, naturalness -- those are the spiritual goals of the Bull.  Silence too.  But not just the kind that comes from keeping your mouth closed.  The Bull's silence is deeper: it's a quiet heart.  Feel the wind in your hair.  Feel the efficiency of your body, the rightness of its rhythms, the easy intelligence of your cells and muscles.  That's Taurus.  The part of you that's learning the lessons of the Bull is getting more grounded, more present, more receptive to immediate reality.  As a result, it has a physical orientation and a practical feeling.  It's not so interested in abstract flights of speculation.  It avoids the metaphysical Disneylands that seem to fascinate so many people.  It specializes in the wordless mysticism of ordinary life.

Feed your Taurean side with hands-on work: gardening, crafting wood or cloth, communing with animals.  Soothe it with music.  Restore and renew it with time spent close to nature -- in the forest, in the mountain valley, by the ocean.  Dress it in blue jeans and flannel.  And never, ever, ask it to go to a cocktail party!

With your Sun in Taurus, you renew your basic vitality in simple ways.  Take a walk in the woods.  Paddle a canoe.  Build something of oak or maple.  Your deepest nature is quiet, stable, solid.  You benefit from having a strong tone of continuity in your life -- especially in relationships.   Keep in touch with old friends.  Stay close to people who aren't too quick to get off on "trips," be they guru-scenes, make-a-million schemes, or a new kind of bean sprout that will change your life.  At the deepest level, you are learning about calm and naturalness.  So keep things simple.

Your practical skills are enormous: you understand the world of raw materials, of money, of daily life.  Be careful those skills don't run away with you!  A pitfall for you lies in getting so busy keeping all your responsibilities magnificently fulfilled that you starve yourself for quiet time.  Then the Sun grows dimmer in you, and every other aspect of your character has less light to reflect.

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

What do you want out of life?  What are your priorities?  What kind of old person are you in the process of becoming?  Those are core Eleventh House issues.  The challenge here is to accomplish something many people talk about but few actually do--lead a life; that is, create your future according to your deepest interests and values.

The planetary forces focused in this segment of your birthchart are Teachers dedicated to helping you find the threads of your destiny.  They describe what you were born to become -- and warn you of how you look when you're off course.

"House of Friends" is the old name for this part of the birthchart, although "House of Acquaintances" is perhaps more accurate.  Intimacy isn't the issue here; teamwork and networking are.  But clear priorities must come first, or all those talking faces serve no purpose.  They just tie you up in pointless social interactions.

With the Sun in the Eleventh House, you're majoring in a couple of closely related subjects: group dynamics and the formation of life-strategies.  Increasingly, you'll find yourself in positions of leadership... but not dictatorship.  That is, you'll be working to hold together often contentious crowds of individuals, and you'll be needing to do that with diplomacy rather than brute force.  For those team-projects to be ultimately successful, it's critically important that you know exactly what you stand for personally.  Every year or so, try to get off by yourself for a couple of days and think about what you've accomplished, what you're doing next, and how you've evolved since last year.  One more point: The second half of your life will tend to be more dynamic and colorful than the first half; it takes you a while to get up to full steam, but when you do, there's no stopping you.

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 Tenth house of your chart.

Community -- that's the key to the Tenth House. How do you fit into your local branch of civilization?  What role do you play there?  "He's an anesthesiologist." That's a Tenth House statement. But so is, "She's into the women's movement." Even though she doesn't make a dime being a feminist, it still says something about the hat she wears in the community.

Planetary Teachers in this House do two things for you.  They outline your "cosmic job description." That is, they tip you off about the role you were born to play in your community. Unfortunately, they don't do that very well; there are a billion roles and only ten planets, so the descriptions they provide are of necessity rather vague.  At best, they're rough guidelines.

Tenth House Teachers do better with their second task.  They point out parts of your own character that need to be developed to a radical degree before your mission coalesces before your eyes.  Accept their suggestions, act on them, and you'll leave a lasting stamp of your vision upon the myths and symbols of your community.

With the Moon in the Tenth House, your "cosmic job description" is lunar in tone; that is, you were born to play the role of healer, nurturer, or imaginer in the human family.  Counselor, physician, massage therapist -- they're all on the right track.  But there's more to heal than the mind or body; you might also heal the soul of the community.  Ministers may well have this configuration; also the poets, playwrights, and novelists who inspire us.

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, Gemini was lifting over the eastern horizon of Lockport,New York. Let's begin our analysis by considering the meaning and spiritual message of the sign of "The Storyteller".

Wonder, amazement, astonishment, a sense of the miraculous -- those states of consciousness are the best of what Gemini symbolizes.  Although this is an Air sign and therefore rather mental in its orientation, the Twins represent something more primal than thinking.  They represent perception itself: all the raw, undigested stuff that pours in through our senses.  Thinking too much about that material removes us from its immediate, moment-to-moment reality.  We start to inhabit theories instead of the actual world of perception.  "Authority" creeps in.  So does "rightness."  And "mental clarity."  And the Twins wither. Nourish your Geminian energies with an endless diet of newness and change.  They're hungry for anything they've not seen or felt before.  Feed them!  Give them conversation, books, travel, education... anything but boredom.

With Gemini rising, your outward style is quick and alert, hungry for input.  You have a sharp wit and a mind that's faster than Ma Bell's switchboard.  For most of your life, people will tend to underestimate your age... the reason being that we tend to associate curiosity and energy with youth!  You have plenty of both, and that'll be just as true on your ninety-seventh birthday.  To feel centered, you need to flood your senses with torrents of new information.  You can do that by traveling, or by reading, or by pursuing education.  One of your favorite methods is to talk with interesting people... just make sure you listen too.

Cultivate patience; the world is full of folks who are full of fascinating insights and experiences, but most of them pace their lives -- and minds -- more slowly than yours.  You'll need to slow down a bit to synchronize enough with them for the data exchange to take place.

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 Taurus with the Moon in Pisces and Gemini 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 Naturalist", or "The Elf", or "The Silent One". Those are just different ways of saying you have the Sun in Taurus.

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 Storyteller", or "The Journalist", or "The Witness". Those images capture the spirit of your Ascendant, which is Gemini.

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.

Your own birthchart is complicated by the fact that, at your birth, Mercury was aligned with the Sun... or "conjunct" the Sun, to use the proper astrological term. Thus, the energy and spirit of that planet is fused with your solar identity. In a sense, you are an "incarnation" of Mercury."

What can that mean? Start by understanding the significance of the planet.

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 shaped by the quiet, earthy reasonableness of Taurus. Your mind is not quick; instead, it's reflective and deep, with an instinctive appreciation of practicality and resourcefulness -- and for the eloquence of silence. Spiritually you are learning to use logic effectively as a convenient tool without becoming so identified with it that you become a human microchip.

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."

While a fairly large number of people have Mercury in that sign and house, the fact that it lies conjunct your Sun gives it special emphasis. By pushing the strengths it suggests toward their limits, you charge your solar vitality, approach your destiny, and set the stage for fullfilling your spiritual purpose.

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

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 Aries. Thus, both your aesthetic sensitivity and your taste in partners is shaped by the direct, primal spirit of the Warrior. In the realm of beauty, whether natural or wrought by human hands, you have a taste for the elemental and primitive... no frilly fru-fru need apply. The same goes for friends and sexual partners -- you appreciate honesty, a willingness to roar, and a simple dedication to basics, such as loyalty and plain speech.

With Venus in the Eleventh House, as you mature, your Venusian energies figure more prominently in your character and situation. That suggests a trend toward more prosperity, more comfort, and better fortunes in the world of intimacy as the years go by. There is an artist in you, but it's a late-bloomer... even if that truth is veiled by lesser successes earlier in life. Is all that guaranteed? Yes... provided you don't cancel it by slipping under the thumb of the dark Venus, descending into laziness, self-indulgence, and escapism.

Your Eleventh House is crowded. Also found here is Saturn.

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 fiery terrain of Aries 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 Ram's shadow side: fear and self-victimization. Will yourself toward courage! And support that bravery in practical, Saturnian terms by fortifying yourself with concrete skills and strategies -- especially ones pertinent to Saturn's House in your birthchart. Which House was that?

The Eleventh! The arena of life where we establish the framework of priorities that governs the shape of our futures... and where we link up with the network of allies who help us attain our goals. With Saturn here, you were born to accomplish some Great Work... but not until the second half of your life. Until then, you are becoming the kind of person who can fill those shoes -- developing clear moral or aesthetic values, learning self-discipline and concentration... and seeking out a sober, supportive community of friends.

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

Peel away the layers of the psychological onion, get down to the core of your being, the realm of your heros and nightmares -- you've entered the Fourth House.  This is psychic bedrock.  Traditionally, it's the House of the Home.  That's a valid notion in lots of ways.  First, with any astrological factor in this part of the birthchart, you're at least "minoring in psychology" and that process requires a safe haven; hence, you feel an elevated need for the privacy and security of the "nest."  Second, much of your psychic bedrock was profoundly influenced -- or scarred -- by your childhood experiences.  Many of your most fundamental challenges spin off the effects of a powerful parent upon your present character.  Third, "Home" is "where you're coming from" -- and this House answers that question in the deepest way: it's the core of your being.

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 Virgo, the process of individuation for you is tied up with the Path of the Artisan. That is to say, you strengthen and clarify your own Uranian identity through cultivating and polishing your innate hunger for the attainment of consummate skill. At what? Almost anything, so long as it requires effort, self-discipline, and practice. Without such a craft, you're likely to befuddle yourself with a love-hate, approach-avoidance attitude toward your daily responsibilities.

House of the Home -- that's the old name for the Fourth House, where your Uranus lies. The issues are broader; not just home, but also your psychological "home base" -- the innermost "Myth of Self." Uranus is your Teacher here, and the myth or archetype upon which your outer life must be founded is that of the Genius or the Revolutionary. But to achieve the expression of that brilliance you first face some friction: something happened to you in your early life, something that antagonized the expression of your individuality. Find it and conquer it.

"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 Virgo. Thus the shadow material you are called upon to face has to do with the dark side of the Perfectionist archetype: surrendering to cynicism and defeat. In what part of your life or personal history have you chosen to take refuge in bitterness over the pain of continuing your journey? (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 Fourth House... the part of the birthchart where what we call "psychology" happens. Spirit has blessed you with sound instincts regarding the way people come to live with their old wounds, surviving, but also suffering. To create a sense of meaning in your life, you need to accept your role as a healer of spirits. To do that, you must first recognize the places where darkness touched you as a child.

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.

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 Leo. 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 Performer. That means you need to do something creative when you're feeling blue--paint a picture, sing in the shower, join a theater group. For you, that kind of self-expression -- and the resultant appreciation -- is a panacea.

In your chart, the "King of the Gods" reigns in the Third House -- traditionally the "House of Communication." You are a natural teacher, able to convey not only information to people, but also enthusiasm for that information. Given time and an audience, you're a spellbinding storyteller. Spiritually, you are learning to gain confidence in the fact that you have a very specific kind of healing in your voice: you can give people hope, and doing that is a big piece of your destiny.

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 lies quietly in Taurus... waiting. This is an odd combination, but a powerful one. The bull's patience clashes with the impulsiveness of the red planet. The result, at best, is that they temper each other; under pressure, you tend to remain calm and deductive. That's the good news. The bad news is that you need to avoid doing a "slow burn" when a quick confrontation would be better for everyone. Spiritually you're learning a lot about how to claim your right to have peace and quiet -- forcefully, if necessary.

With Mars occupying your Twelfth House, the "War God" stands between you and the realization of loftier states of consciousness... not as an obstacle, but as a bridge. What that means is that you've come to a place in the spiritual journey where, if you're going to go further, you need to become braver. The point is that, despite the pretty words in inspirational books, there's something frightening about entering higher levels of awareness, and that very jitteriness is holding you back. Hence, your "guru" is the "Cosmic Warrior."

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 Scorpio. Thus, to trigger higher states of consciousness in yourself and to stimulate your psychic development, you may choose to follow the Path of the Sorcerer... that is consciously, intentionally to seek access to the power aspects of the Great Mystery, perhaps through the mastery of healing techniques, or a study of shamanistic traditions, or the use of divinatory methods such as astrology or the tarot cards. Without exposure to the purifying, soul-bleaching effects of what we could broadly call "magic," you tend to drift away from Spirit, losing yourself in the mazes of daily life.

Neptune, planet of transcendence, occupies the Sixth House of your birthchart, where mystical dimensions become linked to your natural skills and instincts for service. You grow spiritually through helping others -- and not because God hands out brownie points, but rather because service, more than any other spiritual discipline, teaches us humility and compassion. One more piece of the puzzle: You have a special instinct for working directly with other people's unconscious minds. This may mean you were born to help others unravel their dreams, or that you should work with guided imagery, or with hypnosis.

 

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 Libra, the sign of the Diplomat. Anyone looking into your eyes as you took your first breath would have observed the result of lifetimes spent learning the virtues of true courtesy: sensitivity towards the feelings and values of others, an ability to adjust your behavior to fit another's needs and fears. In previous incarnations you've had experiences which bring to mind that old joke about how one properly addresses a five-hundred-pound gorilla -- Call him "sir!" Now, like an obsequious houseslave who's just been freed, you must learn a new lesson: how to claim your own rights, experiences, and nature.

That nascent ability to claim what's yours is symbolized by your North Node of the Moon, which lies in Aries -- the sign of the Warrior. 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 Arian spiritual work? The "yoga" is easy to say, harder to do: you must overcome your peaceful instincts and consciously seek stress... that is, you need to intentionally place yourself in situations where forcefulness, energy, and inner fire are methods of survival -- perhaps the only methods.

There's another piece to the puzzle: The Moon's South Node falls in the Fifth House of your chart. This implies that previous to this lifetime you lived out the notion that "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." There has developed in your spirit a spontaneous immediacy... creative and joyful, but vulnerable to the life-derailing effects of whimsy and self-indulgence.

In this lifetime, with your North Node of the Moon in the Eleventh House, you must act to counterbalance those whimsical, self-indulgent tendencies... 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 authority over the shape of your own life, establishing your own goals and priorities, determining in advance what kind of elderly person you'll become. Finish what you start!

 

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.