The Sky Within

 

 

Planet	Sign	Position	House		House Cusps
Sun	Pisces	16°Pi04'	12th		01  22°Ar02'
Moon	Scorpio	26°Sc43'	08th		02  27°Ta29'
Mercury	Aries	01°Ar25'	12th		03  20°Ge54'
Venus	Aries	29°Ar19'	01st		04  11°Ca17'
Mars	Taurus	16°Ta28'	01st		05  03°Le34'
Jupiter	Capricorn	04°Cp43'	09th		06  04°Vi02'
Saturn	Gemini	00°Ge43'	02nd		07  22°Li02'
Uranus	Libra	17°Li31' R	06th		08  27°Sc29'
Neptune	Sagittarius	05°Sg15'	08th		09  20°Sg54'
Pluto	Libra	01°Li06' R	06th		10  11°Cp17'
Midheaven	Capricorn	11°Cp17'	10th		11  03°Aq34'
Ascendant	Aries	22°Ar02'	01st		12  04°Pi02'

 

 

 

 

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 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 Sun in Pisces, you face an astrological paradox: the symbol of identity (the Sun) is shaped by the sign that refers to transcending the identity.  There's something inside you that keeps eroding your ego, filling you with a sense of the cosmic joke -- we're all spiritual monkeys dressed in perfect human attire, really believing we're insurance salespeople, housewives, and VIPs.  And people wonder why you always seem to laugh at "inappropriate" times!

Take care of that spirit-spark inside you.  Make certain you have a little bit of time every day to stop being yourself, to float into that vast, luminous space between your ears.  Otherwise, you'll start "transcending" at awkward moments: losing the car keys, missing highway exits, losing the thread of conversations.

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 Scorpio.

The Scorpion!  A spooky image for a spooky sign.  There's a scary side to life.  People get terrible diseases.  Kids get damaged.  Old people are forgotten.  Everybody dies.  Socially we're conditioned to avoid mentioning those things, or to mention them only in ritual contexts -- like jokes or political speeches.  For Scorpio, the evolutionary aim is to face those shadowy places.  To make the unconscious conscious.  To break taboos.

The Scorpio part of you is deep and penetrating.  It has little patience with phoniness or hypocrisy.  Trouble is, a little phoniness or hypocrisy often make life a lot easier for everyone!  Be careful of becoming so "deep" that you lose perspective.  In the Scorpion part of your life, you could slip into brooding and heaviness.  So laugh a little!  And find a few friends you can talk to.  Do that, and you'll keep you balance well enough to find wisdom.

With the Moon in Scorpio, your inner life is a cyclone of intensity.  Your instincts are penetrating, probing, deeply aware of the dark undercurrent of need and fear that runs beneath our facades of normalcy.  It's as though your ability to hold painful or dramatic emotional material out of consciousness is diminished; you face the dragons every day.  The trick is to slay them before they cook you!  How?  It's essential that you find people who'll help.  Allies.  Who are they?  The only kind of folks with whom you're comfortable: people who never take refuge in "politeness," men and women who look you right in the eye.  You may sleep with them; you may not.  It doesn't matter.  All that counts is that you communicate.

The trap you need to avoid is a kind of psychic implosion; you could hold so much inside yourself that you become a human black hole, seething, but emitting no information.

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

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.

With the Moon in the Eighth, you've placed the most sensitive part of yourself in the stormiest House.  Everything here is intense.  All emotions are heightened.  Nothing is simple.  Hungers, nightmares, painful memories -- all take on extra vividness.  So does the poignancy of love.  And the awesome magic of night, and wind, and crashing thunder.  When you bond in love, the glue is strong and not easily broken.  For you, life -- and death -- are full of magic.  The evolutionary pitfall you must dodge?  It's getting so identified with your own turbulent inner life that you slip inexorably into moodiness and emotional exhaustion.

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

Courage!  That's what Aries is all about.  Traditionally this sign is represented as the Ram -- a fierce, frightening creature.  That's a pretty good description of how this energy looks from the outside.  Inside, it's different.  Not the Ram, but the newborn robin, two days old, just hatched from its shell, living in a world full of creatures who think of it as breakfast.  Does it cower?  No -- the little bird flaps its stubby wings and squawks its head off, demanding its right to exist.  That's Aries: the raw primal urge to survive.  Existential courage.

Courage is a funny virtue -- it has to be scared into a person.  In the evolutionary scheme of life, Aries energy has a disconcerting property: it draws stress to itself.  You can choose a life of risk and adventure.  Or you can choose a life of one damn thing after another.  Refuse the first, you'll get the second.

However gentle your intentions may be, with Aries rising, you often frighten people!  Your "mask" is direct, brusque, impulsively honest.  Only people with solid ego-structures get along easily with you -- unless you intentionally tone yourself down.  That's something you may learn to do in social or business situations, but it's no fun and doesn't contribute directly to your happiness or sanity.

What helps you feel centered is basically "going for it" -- taking chances, putting yourself on the line.  That can involve adventure, or some sporting activity, but just as readily it can be confronting a friend with a real disagreement -- and those who are truly, naturally, your friends will enjoy that process rather than view it as a threat to your relationship.  However we look at it, one key notion emerges: for you to feel good, you need to feel the "edge" every now and then.

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 Pisces with the Moon in Scorpio and Aries 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 Mystic", or "The Poet", or "The Dreamer". Those are just different ways of saying you have the Sun in Pisces.

We can say you have the soul of "The Detective", or "The Sorcerer", or "The Hypnotist"... your Moon lies in Scorpio, in other words.

We can add that you wear the mask of "The Warrior", or "The Survivor", or "The Daredevil". Those images capture the spirit of your Ascendant, which is Aries.

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 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 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 is Mars.

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 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.

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 Twelfth 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 percolating in Aries. That combination links your mental functions with the energetic logic of the Warrior archetype. The result is that your mind is sharp, penetrating... and combative. Instinctively you think in terms of pros and cons, letting them do battle with each other. Spiritually you are learning a lot about uncompromising honesty... and about its costs.

With the traditional "Messenger of Gods" occupying your Twelfth House, your intelligence is much concerned with the investigation of consciousness itself. You trigger greater psychic sensitivity and spiritual awareness in yourself when you flood your senses with incongruous, surprising, stimulating information or questions: What's the sound of one hand clapping? The trick here lies in using the intellect to trip the intellect.

A planet can gain authority by sharing a House with the Moon. We find that situation in your chart. Neptune is bathing in moonlight, occupying the Eighth House along with Luna.

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 Sagittarius. Thus, to trigger higher states of consciousness in yourself and to stimulate your psychic development, you may choose to follow the Path of the Gypsy... that is consciously, intentionally to expand awareness, perhaps through pilgrimage to holy places, certainly through a study of metaphysical philosophy. Without exposure to the purifying, soul-bleaching effects of that kind of mind-stretching activity, you tend to drift away from Spirit, losing yourself in the mazes of daily life.

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....

Your birthchart displays another area of heightened activity: the Sixth 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.

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.

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 Libra, the process of individuation for you is tied up with the Path of the Lover. That is to say, you strengthen and clarify your own Uranian identity primarily through contact with soulmates, although that process isn't always as romantic as it sounds. Those soulmates will often help you be true to yourself by putting you under enormous pressure to do just the opposite! Don't be seduced. Your integrity is more valuable than that.

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.

"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 Libra. Thus the shadow material you are called upon to face has to do with the dark side of the Lover archetype: shallowness. In what part of your life or personal history have you chosen to preserve the appearance of peace and understanding at the expense of truth? (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 Sixth House... the part of the natal chart concerned with competence, responsibility, and service to others. It is pivotally important that you find a kind of work in which you have a profound moral stake. Just making money and not hurting anyone will never be enough for you. There is pain in the world; your job is to address it... even in places where success is unlikely.

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.

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 buzzing terrain of Gemini 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 Twins' shadow side: chaos, and the inability to stick to a predetermined course. Will yourself toward sustained effort! And support that journey in practical, Saturnian terms by fortifying yourself with habits of mental focus. Those skills are especially pertinent in regard to Saturn's House in your birthchart. Which House was that?

The Second! The arena of life where we must prove ourselves to ourselves -- or slip into crippling self-doubt. With Saturn here, you build faith in yourself brick by brick through taking on long-term, often solitary, projects that ask for everything you can do. Depending on the tone of the rest of your birthchart, that could mean anything from medical school to a solo trek across Greenland by dogsled. You weren't born with a lot of faith in yourself, but you were born with the ability to earn it.

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 Capricorn. 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 Builder. Joy, for you, lies in the hard-won victory, the goal reached, the pinnacle attained. When you're sad, create a triumph for yourself -- that's  the only cure. The triumph may be huge -- like getting your Ph.D. -- or it may be a little, daily thing, like actuallly getting around to cleaning out the closet.

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!

 

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 Leo, the sign of the Aristocrat. Anyone looking into your eyes as you took your first breath would have observed the results of lifetimes spent learning the virtues of leadership: authority, drama, a sense of theater. In previous incarnations you've experienced power, position, success. But now, like an actor who's played the same part one too many times, you must learn a new lesson: radical, spontaneous self-expression without regard to any audience.

That nascent ability simply to be yourself without regard to the opinions of others is symbolized by your North Node of the Moon, which lies in Aquarius -- the sign of the Outsider. 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 Aquarian spiritual work? The "yoga" is easy to say, harder to do: you must temper some of your performing, success-oriented instincts, and consciously release your attachment to positive reviews. That is, you need to intentionally place yourself in situations and relationships where you're free to express the highest truths you know... even if the price is that you seem a little strange.

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.