Issue 3, March 2007

  Moon Magic
  Neptune swimming in Saturn's Waters 
  Astrology Primer

March has been a busy month for us, with the biggest "alternative" event of the year on St. Patrick's weekend in Dublin.  We made lots of new friends there, some of whom will be receiving this newsletter for the first time.  A special welcome to you!

We're a little late with this month's issue, but we have a full slate of articles for you anyway.  We start with our regular feature on the upcoming Full and New Moons.  We then take a look at a configuration that has been an ongoing feature in the skies for the past eighteen months or so and is completing its final lineup until July this year - the Neptune/Saturn opposition. Finally, for new astrologers, our series of lessons on basic astrology continues with an explanation of the astrological houses.

Enjoy!
Ingrid and Barry.

Moon Magic

“Those who find the right words never offend anyone.
Yet they speak the truth.
Their words are clear but never harsh.
They do not take offence and they do not give it. ”
The Buddha. 

Full Moon in Libra

Look out for the Full Moon on April 2^nd – she glows golden in the sign of Libra, the sign of marriage, relationship, equality, and justice.  Libra is an air sign, and the element of air is concerned with ideas, strategy, concepts and Platonic Principles.  Libra is about dualism and the kind of relating that belongs to the sensitive idealist or the idealist in search of that unattainable pearl of perfection!   The symbol for Libra is the scales –  reminiscent of the scales in the ancient Egyptian Hall of Maat where hearts were weighed against white feathers to see if they were worthy of joining the ancient gods in the Fields of Reeds.

So, this Full Moon time would be an opportune time to bring our focus on Self and Other.  Our primary relationship or the relationships we have with friends and work colleagues.  Full Moon questions to journal or ask yourself might be: How well do I communicate my needs?  How attentively do I listen?  What do I hear?  In my intimate encounters, how do I create soft pockets of safety for heartfelt listening? Where do I need to give a little more and take a little less?  This Libran Moon calls for Truth and Justice, Fair Play and Harmony.   Focus attention today on empathy – and just for today, imagine how it must feel to walk in your partner’s moccasins or Manolo Blaniks!  It is through partnership and co-operation with other people we will learn our greatest life lessons – and at this Full Moon we can choose to place things on the scales of Balance to see through the eyes of the Other.

Where Libra is in our birth chart is the area in our lives where we need to strive for balance and equality – and this is usually most difficult to achieve in our intimate relationships where power struggles disconnect and entangle us in a morass of miscommunication and conflict.  If you were born when the Moon was moving through the sign of Libra, a solitary existence will be anathema to you – you need to interact with others and your greatest learning will be in the area of your intimate relationships and friendships.  If you are connected to your lunar energy, you might find it difficult to deal with conflict and unpleasantness.  This might mean you have ‘the need to please’ and tend to see the other person’s point of view rather than say how you really feel or claim what it is you need – which could lead to all kinds of messy miscommunication.

New Moon in Aries

In contrast to the heady concepts of Justice, Fairness and Balance, the New Moon of April 17th is in Aries – the polarity sign to Libra in the wheel of the Zodiac.  Aries brings us back to Self – what we want to accomplish in the way of our goals and our vision for our life’s journey.  With Aries energy we are Numero Uno !   So work with the spontaneity and optimism of this fiery New Moon energy.  Now would be a good time to initiate a new project, to enroll in a salsa dance class, join a hiking club,  get to the gym, or book a ticket for that much needed adventure holiday.  Take the initiative!  Now is a great time to get going on new  projects that require enthusiasm, heart felt passion, and energy – even if you run out of impetus and move onto something else!  Aries fire energy is great at starting, initiating… not always the hard slog of follow-through.  But here is a noble, passionate, instinctive Moon, where heart-felt responses are decisive and spontaneous, and inspirational!  The motif is the here and now – passion rather than reason.

If you were born with the Moon in Aries, your emotional hard-wiring might be volatile and impulsive, even highly strung.  There is an endearing naivety about the Aries Moon energy that is playful and courageous, so use this New Moon time to initiate something new – set your sights on a goal then move courageously forward!

Spring Equinox

The Spring Equinox on March 20^th marked the balance of equality for night and day. The Earth adorns herself with golden headed daffodils, crocuses, and confetti blossoms. Butterflies stitch up sunbeams, and sap rises as the trees thrust their greenness upwards the blueness of cloudless skies. This is the time of renewal and resurrection in the North.  A sense of hope and celebration, and in times long ago, a celebration of the renewal of food supplies.  In the South, sun-bleached grasses cast their seeds upon the chill winds and burnished leaves spiral softly to the ground – a time to go inward and step resolutely towards Winter Dreaming as the baked soils sigh for rain.

Neptune swimming in Saturn's Waters

The Western world view is scientific and structured, rational and reasonable – on the surface, at least.  Astrologically, we are drawn immediately to Aquarius, especially when we consider its traditional ruler, Saturn.  We float at the end of the watery Age of Pisces, about to enter the air sign called the Water Bearer.  Here on the cusp of the ages, we hover in a paradox... 

This is the templum of Neptune where mystery, illusion, delusion, spirituality and dark addiction mingle, for Neptune governs realms with no beginning and no end… chaotic and primal, compelling, oblivious, and alluring.  The bottomless great Deep… Paradise Lost … The Garden of Eden which is that uroboric longing we have never regained.  Our ancestors sought a connection to the secrets of the Otherworld and gave expression to the collective yearning through shamanistic ritual, and more recently in our history, the Mysteries at Elysium which are believed to have begun during the Mycenaean Age and were held annually for two thousand years.  A connection to the secret watery currents of the magical lost Otherworld… 

Neptune has been orbiting silently in space for eons, and ancient writings suggest that it was present in the collective unconsciousness long before it was “discovered” in 1846.  Interestingly, the naming of Neptune coincided with the rise of spiritualism, hypnosis and anaesthesia in the Western world.  Neptune takes 165 years to complete its silent whirl around the Zodiac, and with its movement through each of the signs of the Zodiac it dons a different cloak, giving subtle expression to a collective yearning.  So those of us who are born within a timeframe of fourteen years have Neptune in the same sign, so that its effect is generational.

If you have Neptune in a particular sign, you share that sign, and the collective energies it symbolizes, with everyone born in a period of about a decade and a half. With the slow movement of the outer planets we find that history does not repeat itself in concrete events but in the great sweep of human evolution… glimpsing this new reality inwardly is difficult in the nebulous oceanic realm of Neptune, but Neptune becomes slightly less elusive in our generational groups.  We tend to be born with similar a world view…  and with Neptune, this becomes apparent in the clothes we wear, the movies we watch, the drink and drugs we imbibe,  the music we listen to, our dream for the perfect society, the perfect body, the perfect partner, or a connection to The Divine.

Neptune in Aquarius

“I came upon a child of god He was walking along the road And I asked him, where you are going And this he told me I’m going on down to Yasgur’s farm I’m going to join in a rock n roll band I’m going to camp out on the land I’m going to try and get my soul free … We are stardust We are golden And we’ve got to get ourselves Back to the Garden ...

By the time we got to Woodstock We were half a million strong And everywhere there was song and celebration And I dreamed I saw the bombers Riding shotgun in the sky And they were turning into butterflies Above our nation We are stardust Billion year old carbon We are golden Caught in the devils bargain And we’ve got to get ourselves Back to the garden ” Joni Mitchell.

Heralded by the troubadours and seers of the sixties and seventies, Neptune gracefully slipped into the sign of Aquarius in 1998.  This heralded a new millennium and a new decade.  Its journey through Aquarius suggests a more subtle resonance with the collective that goes beyond ego-identity.  Neptune’s passage here embraces the human family through shared ideals and aspirations – Salvation through human fellowship.  But remember, Aquarius is a fixed air sign, and the traditional ruler of Aquarius is Saturn, Lord of Karma.

Truth and Lies - Neptune opposition Saturn

The Saturn-Neptune opposition will be the major alignment for the anima mundi for the remainder of this decade, structuring collective consciousness before the potential crises of 2010 and beyond.   The Saturn-Neptune gestalt is a mood swing in the collective psyche – reality versus distortion.  This aspect has a haunting, darkly gothic and poetic quality that was portrayed during the Saturn square Neptune alignment of 1998-99, which brought into the collective consciousness a discernment of reality from fiction, the separation of truth from illusion, depicted in movies like The Matrix, Dark City, and The Truman Show.

Aesthetically, the Saturn-Neptune configuration is known for its cool, dark, atmospheric quality – the darkly gothic, the hauntingly ethereal.  Numinous Saturn-Neptune motifs have a notably stark and desolate quality.  Aesthetically, the bleached out motif of Darren Aronofsky’s Picaptures the mood of the Saturn-Neptune aspect.

Neptune in Aquarius embraced mass-market spirituality.  There was a new collective yearning.  A new idealism emerged.  Deepak Chopra, Gary Zukav, Marianne Williamson, have became household names.  Oprah Winfrey and Dr Phil McGraw brought tell-it-like-it-is psychology to a studio audience and the world.

In Mundane Astrology, which is the astrology of worldly events, the configurations of Saturn and Neptune signify times in human history when we make efforts, mostly bloody and violent (human nature being what it is) to revisit The Garden.  These can be times of extreme re-enactment of archetypal roles – the persecutor and the victim, the redeemer and the starving masses.  Neptune in the sign of Aquarius could be very subversive, because of the Aquarian resonance with ideals and the ideal society.  Liz Greene, in her seminal book, The Astrological Neptune and the Quest for Redemption, writes that like an individual, a nation can also be more or less conscious.  Important links are to be seen in the charts of nations and the chart of an individual who becomes its leader, she writes.  Some populations can be easily manipulated and controlled by powerful political and religious figures who embody the unconscious repressed elements of the collective.  Hitler’s natal Saturn conjoined Neptune in the natal chart of the Weimar Republic, for instance.

Since the late ’90s, Neptune in Aquarius manifested as our compassionate response to the victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami, the Aids orphans of Kwa Zulu Natal, the outpouring of grief in mid 1997 over the death of a glamorous princess we had never met personally, the shock and horror of The Twin Towers… seen through the Neptunian medium of film.

1998 was the year the Asian economic crisis spread fear and scarcity.  In May of that year, India and Pakistan were engaged in nuclear brinkmanship.  Indonesia's Suharto toppled.  Middle East negotiations inched forward, and then faltered.  Northern Ireland’s illusive “peace” became tangible after decades of violence.  In post-Apartheid South Africa, it was on October 28th, 1998 that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission presented its report, revealing horrific atrocities as the abscess of lies and cover-ups burst open, sticky with hate and fear and pain. In March of that year, a South African Supreme Court judge declared the 38-year marriage of President Nelson Mandela and his wife, Winnie, officially dissolved. There was a collective shift of consciousness as the South African Nation braced itself for the slippery ride over the Rainbow.

This opposition is also a time where we simply cannot but help focus on the seriousness of the ecological damage being done to our Blue Planet – too many people, too much debris – and the self-absorbed adolescent disregard of our treatment of Home will receive punitive retribution from the Collective superego. Saturn-Neptune in the late 1980s witnessed the Exxon Valdez oil spill with Saturn concretizing the problem by bringing a mature and thorough study of the effect of oil on the environment.
 
During Neptune’s slow transit through Aquarius, those of us with personal planets in Leo, Aquarius, Scorpio or Taurus in our birth charts, will feel Neptune’s whisper until the ingress into Pisces in 2011.  As Neptune touches each of our planets, the energies of those planets will be sensitized, confused or even idealized. Neptune brings pain when planets pertaining to our ego-drives like the Sun, Mars or Saturn are cloaked in Neptune’s shimmery veil, ushering a time of confusion, fear and insecurity, especially with the hard aspects like the conjunction, square and opposition. So, if Neptune makes an aspect to your Moon, this would not be a good time to make a permanent commitment in matters of the heart, for instance.

Neptune is the antithesis of Saturn – where leaden Saturn makes solid, watery Neptune dissolves and invites us to allow it to wash over us in our poignant yearning to escape from the cross of matter, the prison walls of substance.  Where Neptune yearns and drifts, dreams and whispers, Saturn harnesses into prosaic earth-bound form.  Neptune is fantasy and slumber, endless possibility, a glamorous smokescreen… a subtle fragrance, indefinable, and often painfully elusive.  Saturn’s stern face is starkly real. Saturn tightens the belt, stoically bunkers in.  Saturn defends, preserves, and resists change or flexibility.  Saturn is about control, fear, and self sufficiency.  At best, Saturn is the benevolent despot.  At worst the tyrant, the dictator, the persecutor, whether in an individual psyche or the collective consciousness.  Neptune is the mystic, poet, artist and movie star in all of us.  But Neptune’s sentimental longing can often render us passive, vulnerable, chaotic – the Victim.  It can crucify us with our own delusions.  So from August 2006, until mid 2007, when these two opposing, undermining energies are in opposition to one another by transit, this could be a significant time, depending on where Neptune and Saturn are placed in  our natal charts.  Some of us may find this to be a period of great challenge, particularly if the world view is  overly straight-jacketed – rigidly Saturnian. 

Neptune is a difficult planetary transit to deal with.  Ask anyone who has had a Neptune transit, especially to a luminary.  We may be rendered fearful, foggy, conflicted, and disorientated when Neptune dissolves Saturn’s structure.  Boundaries become blurred, thinking becomes fuzzy.  We become world-weary, lost, confused, and discouraged.  Friendships falter, and disengage… we embark on hopeless heartbreaking love affairs; we invest in speculative business ventures, where all is not what it seems.  We engage in acts of self-martyrdom. Neptune dissolves whatever Saturn builds, so it dissolves our sense of reality, duty and responsibility.  We can be prone to fear, and a sense of debilitating defeat.

But if we see this time as a window of opportunity for growth; an opportunity to experience a more expansive way of looking at the world, we could discover that this is a time to embrace new possibilities, and harness these powerful planetary energies to manifest dreams, and bring our desires down to more tangible, practical reality.

This can be a time when we bring into manifestation our yearning to connect with Spirit, our creativity, our ability to bring beauty into our lives.

Our two featured pieces of art this month are by John Nolan:  Pisces, which brings a vibrant, Aquarian sense of colour to a typically watery sign, and Gemini , representing the duality of the twins.

John Nolan is a contemporary Irish artist based in Dublin. His distinctive work has already reached a wide audience.

John's exuberant style combines bold outlines with bright exotic colours. His interpretation of various motifs transmits a positive upbeat feeling to his viewers. These motifs are: Fish, Flowers, People, Birds, Still Life, Abstract, Collage, Landscapes

The celebration of colour and form has preoccupied him from an early age and was nurtured through the encouragement and instruction received from his father who was an artist himself.   Visit his website at: www.nolanart.com.

Astrology Primer

This month we’re going to focus on the astrological houses, as promised.  But first, let’s revisit the signs and planets, which form the other key bases of the chart, so we can see how the houses fit into the overall picture.

Last month, we saw that the Sun and Moon stood for identity and emotional reactions respectively.  In the broadest sense, these are “energies” that we use in our lives.  The Sun is how we shine and become who best we can be.  The Moon reflects lights and thus shows how we react to the world around us.  The rest of the planets stand for energies, too.   For example, Mars is the energy of assertion or aggression, as one might imagine from the god of war.  Venus is the energy of valuing, balancing and receiving, as befits the goddess of love.  The other planets also have energies associated with them, and we’ll draw up a full list later.

The easiest way to think of the signs of the Zodiac is as filters through which the planetary energies act.  The planet’s energy is thus coloured by the sign that it shines through.  The Gemini filter is communicative and factual, for example.  Leo colours everything in majestic, powerful and proud shades.  Pisces has a feeling of gentle caring and other-worldliness.

We’ll go through all the signs later.  But, if you cast you mind back to parts 1 and 2 of this series (see www.velanova.com/Lifetimes.htm), you can begin to see how we can add to the few simple interpretations we made on Marilyn Monroe’s chart.  We said Sun (and Mercury) in Gemini indicated a talkative, humorous and inquisitive identity.  Mars in Pisces suggests that Marilyn’s assertiveness is expressed in a gentle and non-aggressive way.  Having Mars filtered through Piscean waters can be quite a contradiction in terms!

So far, we have planetary energies being filtered through Zodiacal signs.  Where, you may ask, shall we place the houses?

Houses – locations in life

In brief, houses represent the areas in life where the filtered planetary energies play out.  Let’s see what that means.

Like the signs of the Zodiac, there are twelve houses.  We number them 1 to 12 starting at the ascendant and going anti-clockwise around the chart.  The house boundaries are represented be the grey lines in the middle circle of Marilyn’s chart shown here, and you may notice that they are not equally spaced.  In fact, this is one of a number of different ways of dividing the chart into twelve houses, some of which are equally spaced while others have different sizes to those shown here.  How to calculate the cusps (where the houses start) is one of the “diversity” areas of astrology, but whichever method is used, the meaning of each house is widely agreed and that’s our focus here.

The meaning of each house is usually described in terms of a small set of mundane or worldly matters.  Thus, the 3^rd house, for example, is usually ascribed to siblings, neighbours and short journeys.  The 5^th house is related to children, recreation and romance.  The 8^th stands for sex, other people’s money, death and taxes!  At first sight, these seem like a fairly eclectic mix of ideas around each house, but there is method to this apparent madness, as we will see in a later lesson when we take a look at the symbolic language that underpins all of astrology.

For now, we can return again to Marilyn’s chart to see how the interpretations we’ve given so far can be enhanced by looking at the houses.  Her Sun, in Gemini is on the cusp of the 11th house which suggests that her talkative identity was to be channelled through friends, associates, groups or aspirations.  In the early years, Marilyn’s career as a model and ditzy blonde—her identity—progressed not so much through her own efforts, but through acquaintances who supported her aspirations and pushed her ahead.

We previously discussed the Moon and its angular position on the descendant, which is the same as talking about it in the 7^th.  This is because the houses whose cusps lie on the angles take their meanings from the angles themselves.  So, the 7^th house is about committed, one-on-one relationships—from marriage all the way to open enemies.  We also find Jupiter (the dark blue symbol that looks like a number 4 with a hook) in this house.  Jupiter is the energy of expansion and emphasises the importance that this area of life had for Marilyn.

Often when we recall Marilyn Monroe, it is as one of the great sex symbols or all time.  Sexuality in a chart is seen through Mars and Venus, and in this chart, these two planets tell an interesting story.

Mars in Pisces, we already noted, is uncomfortable and not easily assertive of his needs.  Venus, however, is in Aries, a fiery, active sign where she’s not too comfortable either.  Venus in Aries, as opposed to her more naturally receptive role, has a tendency to ardently and perhaps hastily pursue love.  And then when she finds it, she strives for freedom and independence!  From these sign placements alone, we see quite a contradiction in Marilyn’s sexuality, which is further accentuated by the house placements.

Mars is in the 8^th, which, among other things, is all about passion and sexuality.  Together, this suggests strong sexual urges which may be pushed down into the subconscious.  Venus is in the 9^th house.  The meanings ascribed to the 9^th are usually justice, higher education and long-distance travel, and the threads tying these diverse topics together are vision and ideals.  So, this rather assertive Venus is in search of some idealised vision of love.  Drawing all this together, we can see how complex Marilyn’s sexual nature was.  Her sexuality was strong but suppressed.  She was actively searching for idealised romance, but valued her freedom at the same time.  Such mixed messages can be particularly alluring and create a variety of impressions that appeal to many different types of men.

But we haven’t got the whole story yet.  Marilyn also exuded a wounded innocence that was a key factor in her appeal.  Where is that in the chart?  To find it, we need to go beyond signs and houses and take a look at how the planetary energies interact with one another.  And that’s next month’s topic.

But before we close, there’s another way of looking at houses we need to mention.  Beyond the fact that a planet may be in a house, astrologers also note that each house begins in a particular sign; where its cusp stands.  This relationship is often more important that the fact that a house has a planet in it, and of course is key to understanding the house if it’s unoccupied.

Take a look at Marilyn’s 5^th house, which is empty.  Does this mean that the area of her life relating to children, recreation and romance was empty too?  Of course not, but what can we say about it as astrologers?  Here we see that the house cusp stands in Sagittarius.  And Sag is renowned for its optimistic, visionary and seeking attitude to life.  So, this does in fact describe Marilyn’s breezy, devil-may-care approach to play and romance.  It also suggests that having children could well have been a long-distance vision for her, but on that topic we’ll never know the true answer. 

Next month:  Aspects between planets.