Anybody born this coming week is going to have one hellofa Mandala for a birth chart. It looks like the cover of Be Here Now…
It’s busy, but the remarkable – and positive – thing about it is all the symmetry. ALL of the planets are between 6 and 18 degrees, so Monday’s Child (and Tuesday’s, etc, through Friday) will start life with a Grand Sextile, a Grand Cross, two Grand Trines, an extra T-Square, a Diamond Star, three Golden Rectangles, six Pythagorean Triangles, seven French Hens, and a Yod to their Sun-Vesta-Ceres Conjunction! These folks will Change the World.
Well, ALL of the planets except Eris, but then, we knew she wouldn’t be invited to the party, didn’t we.
You use a wider Orb (fudge factor) for a birth chart than for our usual view of current events. The week will be a Portal for us Already-borns anyway, but it takes a four-degree Orb to make the Grand Sextile, and really three degrees (or even one) is more appropriate for most of us most of the time. Of course, if you measured four degrees or more when you measured your Sensitivity a while back, you’ll be changing the World too.
And if your birthday is coming up, then this will be your Solar Return chart, and you’re going to have one hellofa year, Changing the World! The Solar Return chart, drawn for the moment when the Sun returns to where it was when you were born, is a picture of what your year (birthday-to-birthday) will be like. The chart suggests that if you’ve been contemplating doing something entirely different, or taking a whole new approach to what you’ve been doing, or Changing the World, this year is the time to get it started.
And of course, if you’ve been hesitating because your new course might trigger dischord, well, everything World-Changing does, doesn’t it. Imagine how much dischord followed Gandhi around!
For the rest of us peasants, the main change from what’s been going on for a while now, is that Vesta is replacing Ceres in the Juno-Nodes Grand Cross. We’ll talk about that.
But y’know, we all will be living under this chart this week, and anything we begin this week will be graced by it. If you’ve been contemplating doing something entirely different, or taking a whole new approach to what you’ve already been doing, or Changing the World, this week is the time to get it started. If you’ve been hesitating because your new course might trigger dischord, imagine how much dischord followed Gandhi around!
In simple terms, red represents Stress, blue Grace, and green Curiosity. The lines symbolize different Angles between the planets, and different Angles represent different ways the planets’ Energies combine. We can experience Stress as Anxiety, Motivation, Frustration, or Excitement, and it’s our response to the Stress that determines the quality of our experience, along with the support we Ask for and receive. Blue and green lines help mitigate the Stress and lean it toward Motivation and Excitement, or at least Confidence, or the sense that the Challenges are not overwhelming. The important thing is Balance, and this chart exudes Balance.
And then there’s Yintegrity. With Uranus Squaring Pluto and Lilith acting out, Yintegrity‘s been in the spotlight for a while. In this World-Changer chart, Uranus has its own T-Square with Mars and Pluto (Compulsion to Act, consequences mopped up later), and – with birth-chart Orb – Lilith joins Mars in the Square to Uranus (Burn, Chauvinist, Burn!). With current-event Orb, Lilith is “only” conjunct Pallas and Jupiter (expanding our Self and in the process strengthening our Boundaries) – that is, lit up in her own right. In our Ouija-Board World, Yintegrity attracts Grace and Synchronicity. Like Gandhi, when we’re in Yintegrity, Grace eases Dischord. It’s only castles burning anyway.
The Grand Sextile
How often do we see a Grand Sextile? Once a decade, once in two decades? Three, four? They don’t happen every day. The Sextile, a Sixth-Harmonic or two-Sign Angle between two planets, represents Creative Grace – outcomes are fortuitous and processes flow smoothly, but only if the Humans involved show a little initiative. A Trine is just dumb luck; a Sextile is about Guidance. A Grand Sextile is six Sextiles end to end in a hexagram or Star of David, circling the entire Zodiac. In this one, the largest Orb (slop) is three-and-a-third degrees, between Chiron and Pluto. A little farther than the sort of Orb that polite company likes to see, but we’re among friends.
You can see from the blue lines in the picture that a Grand Sextile implies two mutually complementing Grand Trines, three rotating Mystic or Golden Rectangles, and three (red) Oppositions – that is, in general, everyone is agreeable and on the same page. They’re Sextiles, so there’s some Operator Initiative involved, it doesn’t happen on its own. But the Operator Initiative is greatly leveraged. While the Oppositions are red as in Stress, it’s Stress only to the Intellect, as the Opposition signifies Contradiction to the Intellect, but Awareness through Contradistinction to the Observer.
When you divide the twelve Signs into two groups by alternating Signs, you get six Yang Signs and six Yin Signs, so a Grand Sextile is either Yang or Yin. This one – as you’d expect considering the times – is Yin. That means your Initiative happens by PIAVA more than Plan-and-Do. You PIAVA an outcome or a tool, then respond to what you’re given. You adapt as you go, tacking toward your objective, rather than forcing your Will on the Universe in a straight line. This is fortunate, because in a World so far from any kind of consensus, a Yang Grand Sextile could easily produce War.
What’s the Yin bottom line? Collaboration, Cooperation, Community. So we PIAVA Collaborative movement toward what we Desire, and Community that supports our Desire. The essence of the Sixth Harmonic is Collaboration and Partnership.
In the Intellectual Yang approach to Life, the Goal is predefined, and the proposed path to it established, before the effort begins. In the Spiritual Yang approach, the Goal is clear to the Seer who can define the steps along the way, but the End Point can’t be put into words because it exists only in a future time that hasn’t been Co-Created yet. In the Intuitive or Instinctual Yin approach, the Desired Outcome is approximate and refined at each step along the way, with much zigzagging and some backtracking. In the Emotional Yin approach, the Outcome is unknown, but there is a clear perception of whether a given step has been successful.
The Grand Cross
By now we’re pretty accustomed to the Juno-Nodes T-Square – which symbolizes shifts in the Ground beneath us, as Juno represents our Shadow, and the Nodes stand for our Desires and Permissions. Whoa! New material? Well, the more perspectives, the better, eh?
Juno stands for our Unconscious Identity, and much of that is our “Shadow,” or the parts of ourselves that we don’t have permission to express. The North Node signals our Mission – and how does our Mission manifest? Desire. Probably not what your mom taught, but there it is – get used to it. Our Karma sits at the South Node, and what is Karma but a lack of Permission to pursue our Desires?
Our Shadow gets its Energy from Desires that we’ve been told are not socially acceptable. So we may have experienced the Juno T-Square, which has been going on since May and will continue through October, as eruptions of our Shadow – our Evil Twin sneaking around or, if we keep our several Selves on a short leash, wanting to get out more. Nothing we aren’t used to, as we’ve been doing this dance all our Life. Just more pronounced this year. I mean after all, Time bailed on us, why haven’t our Shoulds retired as well?
It’s not like we haven’t had help – at the moment both Chiron (Miracles) and Mars (Action) are Trining (Grace) the North Node. But the Nodes require Work for a reason; if we were gifted with permission to pursue all of our Desires, we’d take it for granted. When we earn our right to our Desires, no one can take it away from us. The downsides of Chiron and Mars are Despair and Blame: It’s impossible, I’ll never have what I want! and It’s their fault! Usually it’s our programmers’ fault, but often we use a scapegoat; we were taught to merge with our programmers, so blaming them is blaming ourselves, which of course can lead to Despair. Of course not all Karma/Patterns have their origins in the current lifetime, and even those that do are mere Shadows of their former-lifetime selves.
The reframing (Chiron) that gets you out of the dilemma of the Nodes, is the realization that your Desire, and what you were taught was naughty, are two very different things. To make it easier to talk about, let’s label what-we-were-taught-was-naughty as My Problem. My Problem is one manifestation of our Desire, but not the only one, and by no means the most important one! When we imagine doing My Problem, what do we gain? Excitement? Relaxation? Power? Freedom? Pleasure? Let’s call that My Reward. Now imagine, or PIAVA, having My Reward without having My Problem.
It could be flipped – maybe our Desire is really Community or Acceptance, and My Problem prevents us from having that. We could imagine or PIAVA a Community where My Problem is standard fare. It’s unlikely that we have many Desires that aren’t normal Human Desires, so that’s not far-fetched. And when we imagine doing My Problem, what do we lose? Prestige? Acceptance? Sustenance? Freedom? Power? Imagine having that and having My Problem.
What we’re getting at is that there’s a zillion ways to manifest the Desire that lies underneath My Problem without manifesting the downsides that we believe My Problem will create. We just need to do some excavating to find where our Desire and My Problem diverge, some renegotiating between various of our Selves, some retraining for our Evil Twin, and some reframing of our expectations. All doable.
The Stations of the Cross
What about the fourth corner of the Grand Cross?
Ceres has been there since mid-July, but now the Guard is Changing, Ceres is moving on to bigger and better things, and Vesta is taking a shift. Ceres has been Opposing Juno. Ceres stands in for Sustainability and Sustenance, and Oppositions are about Awareness. So if we’ve been Awake, we’ve probably been noticing some of our own self-sabotage tendencies over the last few weeks – and noticing how easy it suddenly is to change them!
Now for the next lesson – a Vesta-Juno Opposition for the next week-and-a-half, along with Mars and the Sun, with Jupiter not so far behind. Busy busy. Vesta represents that which is Sacred to us, that which we must have if we are to survive and thrive. So we get down to some Desires that aren’t optional. We can put off some repressions for only so long, till they burst through into topside Life, and we just have to adjust everything else to make room for them. Sometimes All you can do is thank the razor / For the fineness of the slash, as Bruce Cockburn so eloquently put it.
By the way, the Juno-Nodes Square is exact this week, but as Juno is Retrograde, it’s the second occurrence of this Angle. That would make this occurrence resemble a peek behind the curtain at the little man who’s pulling our strings, which is to say, a peek at the past-life self and/or the childhood experiences or vows where the self-sabotaging Patterns were set. The first occurrence of the Square, where the original thesis would have snuck up on us, was May 11. If you have a journal, you can pull your own curtain back early.
We can also query the overall Juno-Node Cycle; this is the Waxing Square to the North Node, or the time when the Energy of the current Cycle “becomes permanent.” The Initiation occurred in mid-September 2012 at 30 Scorpio, “Children in Halloween costumes indulge in various pranks.” Rudhyar’s view is “The periodic outlets society furnishes within traditional limits to still-immature energies” – which relates directly to our Repatterning of our self-sabotaging repression of our Desire. Halloween is Samhain, the very position of the North Node in the Grand Cross! Reverse double entendres like this make us sit up and take notice.
A double entendre is when an idiom has dual meaning. By “reverse double entendre” we mean two idioms (astrological indications) with the same meaning.
The make-or-break Challenge represented by Samhain is Defying Death, and the essence of our new Grand Crosser Vesta is that which we would Live or Die for. Reverse triple entendre! And of course Life is continuously in Transformation, and the only real Death is Ego Death. And it’s Ego Death, in the form of intolerable Emotions and unacceptable Identities, that guards our Karma and keeps it locked in the box.
One of the reasons it’s hard to reintegrate our banished Desires is that they’re stuck at the maturity level of the age at which they were repressed. Say we have a Secret Need to be a Leader, but at age seven we were shamed by bullies into believing we didn’t have what it takes (which reinforced that past life where we Led our Village into disaster). Now, when we try to Lead, we’ll do it like a seven-year-old would! Likely with more embarrassment to add to the original shaming and regrets. So we rebel against Following instead, which helps our Secret Need not a whit.
But Rudhyar misses an important point. Most current Cultures regard a great many powerful Energies as “immature” because the Cultures are still trying to ban the Energies from polite society! It’s not immaturity, it’s Limiting Beliefs. Mainstream American Culture doesn’t even believe in Faeries, for example! Western civilization has still not recovered respect for Intuition and the Natural World from the Inquisitions where the Groves and the “Witches” were burned. In male-dominated realms like business, feminine ways are Shamed as immature. When a woman sets a Boundary it must be because she’s a “bitch.”
We don’t need to abandon our repressed Desires because they’re childish – we need to embrace our repressed Desires because they usually embody exactly what the World needs to bring it back into Balance!
We come back to the Uranian message that the World is a gigantic jigsaw puzzle that cannot be put together while any one of the pieces is masquerading as a different piece! Which is precisely the Spiritual function of visiting this Planet, to experience the consequences of inauthenticity.
Astrophyllite
Astrophyllite represents the jigsaw puzzle – making sense out of very large amounts of information. Not only is the Planet’s Deliverance a jigsaw of Authenticity, but our own Mission is as well. As without, so within – it’s all Mirrors. Because it exists in a dimension beyond the Intellectual and the Emotional, our Mission can only be sought by the Spiritual Yang or the Intuitive/Instinctual Yin approach. It’s a complex Silicate Hydroxide of Potassium, Sodium, Iron, Manganese, and Titanium. Potassium and Sodium must be in Balance for the body to thrive. Iron relates the Individual to the Earth. Potassium, Manganese, Titanium, and Silicon all in different ways promote Community, Clarity, Healing, and Liberation from Limitations.
Eris and Her Golden Apple
As the only outlier, at 23 degrees, Eris becomes the Elephant in the subplot. Lord knows it’s dangerous to not invite Eris to a party. The only above-board Angles Eris makes are a
- Square to Mercury (it’s Challenging figuring out how much to expose and how to phrase your exposé) and a
- Trine to Ceres (which is a gift, because it means we can say it without having to give up our meal ticket).
But she makes
- Septile Angles to the Sun, Neptune, and Pluto (wait for exactly the right time to say it!) and
- Quintile Angles to Pallas-Lilith-Jupiter and to Juno (if you can’t be honest with them, it’s not your Tribe).
In other words, it’s Authenticity that rules the roost here, not Political Correctness. It’s not about criticizing others, it’s about speaking up about Denial, and even more so it’s about confronting our own self-sabotage. If we’re going to Change the World, we have to speak our Truth. Not once, but a million times. Everybody, us included, knows what they’re Denying, they see their Evil Twin every day. If they hear three people talking about My Problem, they’ll turn away. But if they hear thirty people talking about it, suddenly they no longer feel the need to hide. When the Denial is about environmental destruction or feudalism or fascism, that’s World-Changing.
jbuss Astrology 