Mercury in Scorpio

The Perseus Nebula is about 1043 light years from Earth.

(photo credit: Spitzer Space Telescope - NASA JPL, Caltech,

L Cieza/University of Texas, Austin, October 2006)

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When Mercury enters Scorpio on September 29th at 11:29 in the morning (UT/+0 time) it will be adding what we might think of as another ‘layer’ to the intensity and complexity of everything which is already going on in life. We’re all doing some ‘testing of the waters’ and we’re all experiencing some form of being tested.

Venus is already in Scorpio – and Venus will remain in Scorpio until October 7th. That means our desire quotient is more insistent than usual and now our thoughts are coming to bear on how we can have what we want…or…wait, is that really what I want?

This is the inward-versus-outward sort of effect this Venus/Mercury combination can truly have. And as we feel ourselves moving back and forth and back and forth between our personal yes-no-yes-no of wanting and realizing no, maybe I don’t want that, we’re all going to get a bit dizzied. Or maybe confused. And yes, certainly frustrated. After all, with the current Sun in Libra there’s some underlying sense that we should be able to make this work…and when it doesn’t work – or if someone disagrees with us or even causes us to feel like we’re being frowned upon, we’re likely to get all out of hand.

We think it’s them. It’s not. The weeks…no, actually the months ahead of Mercury in Scorpio are NOT about them. They’re about us. They’re about our ability to understand why we want what we want and why it’s so hard to change what we want even when it doesn’t work for us.

Even when it’s bad for us.

Even when it’s self destructive to want it or go after it.

Before I go any farther, I want to explain what I said back in that last paragraph about Mercury’s lengthy stay in Scorpio, because this is going to be a doozie of a traverse. Mercury enters Scorpio on the 29th, as stated. Then on October 1st, Mercury will cross the “invisible line” into the shadow of it’s upcoming retrograde. 

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Yes, you heard me…Mercury is going to go retrograde in Scorpio. By the time it gets to doing that, it will have moved all the way up into Scorpio’s high ‘teen degrees – which is the most intense of this seriously fixed water sign.

Call it intensity intensified, and you just about have it. Just remember we’re talking about our mental attributes, our focus…and in particular, the emotionality we bring to any subject.

This is high stakes mentality we’re talking about. And let’s not forget that by nature Scorpio is an interactive sign – and that applies whether you’re interacting, or whether you’re totally anti-interactive. All signs have polarities and hardly anything is thought of as more polarizing than Scorpio, a sign which represents everything which can scare us out of out of our wits not necessarily because the thing itself is scary, but because the feelings we bring to the situation, to the transaction, to the event, to that moment when we face the music (so to speak) are scary to us because they mean so much to us.

Yes, Scorpio is the sign of war and conception and death. But Scorpio is as much a sign about reclamation as it is about destruction – so why do we all get the jitters when something Scorpio comes up?

Answer: because Scorpio anything is about letting go of control. Yes, you can try to control things – you can pick the finest surgery for the operation, you can build the very best weapons and supply the largest army the world has ever seen. You can discuss an investment and read up on market theory and prospectuses on the company and on and on and on.

But when it comes to Scorpio, there is a moment when you have to let go…or when by the very nature of the act or situation, things become unpredictable. They may go exactly as you predict. Then again, they may not. And it’s that exact Scorpio quality which gives us the queasiness, the nervous twitch, the moment of ‘what if’ which is so very, very Scorpio.

Mind you, Scorpio is also very tough. This is a sign about survival so while the prep and wariness goes on you will also feel yourself prepared to endure no matter what. In spite of anything. Scorpio fires our survival instincts like nobody’s business and that’s all well and good.

And that’s pretty much the point: the fear, the positioning, the shyness, the lust, the desire to win, the craving to control or not to have to be in control…all those Scorpio things are good OR bad depending on where we are with ourselves on our ability to survive.

Sometimes yes, this is physical survival. But most of the time, transits of Scorpio are about emotional survival, the making ourselves make it through no matter what comes along.

And let’s be real – there’s a lot of Scorpio action already in progress. We discussed Venus and that’s one part of the puzzle. But Saturn is also transiting Scorpio, and that’s a sure-fired signal that there’s a lot of important growth going on. There’s a lot to be done, and as much as our inner twinge might get to us, we know there are responsibilities we really have to be dealing with.

So in light of that…how much risk will we take?

The Nodes are counting down through Saturn’s first decanate degrees like some sort of space launch countdown. As Mercury enters Scorpio the North Node is at 8, and 8 Scorpio is a degree known for emotional glitches and our ability to outsmart ourselves through our very cleverness. Since the North Node is about relationships and how we need to pay attention, we can hope that the first few days of Mercury in Scorpio will have us focused on those areas where our attentiveness can do us the most good.

I just wouldn’t count on it. Yes, we can insist of ourselves that we do the right thing and in particular, do that Scorpio Thing and not assume we know what’s best for everyone without asking. Scorpio is a sign where we would like to impose our will simply because our emotionality is so strong it feels like invalidation to have to change.

Within a day of Mercury entering its shadow, the Nodes will move back a degree into 7 Scorpio – a degree noted for an indescribable and mysterious strength which appears either as charismatic...or an “alternative”…or even a "rebellious" form. With the North Node resting in this degree for the rest of October, the balance of Mercury’s transit of Scorpio (which is mysterious enough!) is going to like as not be an ocean of wanting to know what is best, wanting to know which is the right choice and wanting to both seize our power and not have to be in charge perhaps at all.

Once Venus moves in Sagittarius on October 7th the sense of what we just might be able to do lightens and brightens. We may not understand everything yet…but we’re likely to find the right questions to ask – and quite possibly the right person to pose those questions to. Providing we don’t get overly pushing about things, there’s good progress to be made in the week or so before Mercury reaches its station/retrograde point (on October 21st) but that ‘don’t push’ is going to push us – and our “buttons” pretty hard!

Pragmatism settles in as Mars hits Virgo on October 15th, at which point one of several things is highly like to be true. Some of us will be in the ‘slow and steady wins the race’ mode. But others of us are definitely going to be feeling stymied and stuck. You may not have the answer or enough information yet (which is very common just prior to a Mercury station)…or you may just not have the courage to decide something – most likely because you know your decision either means you’re ‘risking’ something…or because you out-and-out know that to decide in ‘this’ direction means ‘that’ will happen, but deciding in favor of ‘that’ means something else will happen.

Yes, this would be one of those ‘can’t I have my cake and eat it too?’ sorts of moments. And there is some chance that you might be able to have and eat cake, but you’ll never know unless you commit to one thing or another. And there is that pesky niggling point about how if you thought you were in trouble and it turns out you were simply driving yourself nuts, that’s a whole other brand of being wrong.

In other words…why DID you get so cornfuzzled? What in your psyche caused you to be fear driven? Where did you learn – and through what did you learn – to be so scared of being wrong about anything that dealing with that fact can freeze you in your tracks and lead to even more consequential results?

Ah yes…our mental life is such fun, isn’t it? And with a quick ‘don’t throw anything at me, please…’ the next item up for grabs is a Lunar Eclipse – this one being at 25 Aries on October 18th.

Can you say “wild card”? This is definitely a celestial wild card…with the emphasis on the ‘wild’ side. The nuances of the eclipse itself will be discussed a bit down the road, but just the fact that it is occurring with the Sun in the sign ‘behind’ that Mercury is in puts the Moon (our feeling self and sense of ‘how things are at the moment) in an 8th sign harmonic TO Mercury (below, in yellow) and a 6th sign harmonic FROM Mercury (below, in red).

And that makes the period going into and around the time of Mercury October 21st station/retrograde point a power struggle. Many of us will experience our struggles with something which has to do with what we’re working towards (i.e., that which will afford us the ability or power to move forward in our lives) while others of us struggle with someone…as still others of us struggle with our Self, trying to understand or become better aligned to being the person we know we need to be but have some problem with being.

Make no mistake: this is an intensely provocative moment. But what it’s intended to provoke is not some full scale war, but an awareness of what it means to be in interaction with other people. Or working with other people. Or just being on the planet with 7 billion-plus other people.

Once the Sun moves into Scorpio early on the 23rd (UT/+0 time) the reconciling of our mentality to reality (or to realities) begins in earnest. Life will present us with pressing situations which need negotiating in or carefully negotiating through and woe be to those of us who simply think we can stonewall life.

Yes, you may (MAY mind you!) be able to forestall effects for the moment. But not forever. And those who do evade, avoid or postpone the reality are going to earn what we might negative karmic points… which is a fancy way of saying dealing with whatever is not being owned now later on is going to cost you ever so much more.

And we ain’t just talking money here, buck-os!

So the solar eclipse rolls through on November 3rd, then Jupiter (still in Cancer) goes retrograde on November 7th, doing so at a degree which will trine Mercury’s station/retrograde point.

Not that Mercury will still be lurking there, no. But this should be taken as life’s way of ‘holding us to some point’ and making us mind whatever process is going on.

Or maybe we’ll just mind it a lot, if you take me.

Either way, that Jupiter trines Mercury’s station degree is sort of a la-dee-dah celestial way of saying ‘you thought this was going to be easy? Maybe not!’ which rather goes along with Mercury’s being in retrograde since hardly anything ever gets ‘settled’ under Mercury retrograde.

Then…at last…Mercury goes direct and by Wednesday November 27th, Mercury clears it’s shadow and goes toodling on about its Mercurial business just in time for retailers in the US to do  their boombox holiday business and for lots and lots of people to be traveling not just on Thanksgiving here in America, but throughout the world over the holidays as the Sun heads into Sagittarius on November 22nd (UT/+0 time) and life carries on.

But probably not as it was. Not quite. Between the Solar Eclipse in Scorpio and this rather long Mercury (aka Mercurial) transit of Scorpio, by the time December 5th rolls around and Mercury follows the Sun into Sagittarius, a lot of us will have found out a whole lot more about who we are – and in particular, how well our ‘who we are’ quotient functions when it comes to making decisions, creating alliances and…to paraphrase a well known line, how well we do unto others, since between the things which go into how we do unto them and how where we stand with ourselves determines who we do what unto…how well all of that is working.

Here’s to our recognizing our errant ways – and to the courage and fortitude it not only takes to change us, but to go back and make amends with whoever we might have treated rather badly along the way.

They say ‘to err is human…to forgive, divine.’ Too often we tend to think that’s about forgiving ourselves and just moving on. But where Scorpio is concerned…or I should say especially where Scorpio is concerned (not that anything is scot-free under any other sign) the interactive nature of the energetic requires that we purify ourselves and then connect (or reconnect) and purify that connection. 

Or the process of connecting.

If you’re familiar with Tantra, this is akin to Tantric liberation. Tantra is not just about sex, though many think of it that way. Tantra and Tantric processes are about harmonic alignments and the ‘fine tuning’ of our beings which, through the accessing of our energetics and the matching of what we might call a ‘vibrational frequencies’ allow us to dissolve barriers which lie within us - and between our Self and another (Tantric sex or intimate Tantric unity) - and between our Self and our world.

Seen in this light, the universality of Tantra is very much akin to the universality of the unbounded whole which is Pisces.

Thus because Scorpio as our depth of emotional experience is found as a 9th harmonic – the sign through which we learn or expand our horizons – from Pisces…it is through this that we come to understand that the ‘alliance’ which allows us to access or unlock our Tantric Self and our Tantric experiences with others (which would include our fullest expanse of Scorpio power and personal transformation and transformative experience) is initiated through a “Libran” pathway which requires openness of our Self and to our Self. It requires not the ‘appearance’ of beauty but the willingness to be beautiful in the integrity of our being…which coming from Pisces includes the admission of our fears, our flaws and our humanity.

Scorpio has always been seen as the sign of that power which allows us to understand and reclaim our inner sense of vibrant being. While Mercury is traversing Scorpio during these days of an unfolding solar eclipse cycle, we have a singular opportunity to see without and look within…and thus find that we need to know in order to empower our moving on into greater growth.
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Sun in Pisces

As previously noted, the Sun is moving into Pisces on the same day that Saturn goes retrograde. The date in question is February 18th and the Sun enters Pisces at 12:03 in the afternoon (UT/+0), scant hours before Saturn goes retrograde at 5:04 p.m.

Any time we see this sort of confluence, we know this is not just a moment in time, but a ‘moment in time.’ In other words, we shouldn’t expect this to be just another set of days which goes by with this and that happening which we take note of but don’t think much about.

On the other hand, Piscean effects can be mysterious. Even difficult to understand – or if you prefer scientific parlance, diagnose. Pisces is all that which causes us to feel to a degree that just how we feel and why we feel and how we react to having those feelings…all that comes to the fore.

In this particular case, we have the Sun at 0 Pisces and Saturn at 11 Scorpio. Right away we know we have a (Sun) life (Saturn) lesson in progress.

But that lesson has two different versions. Or perhaps we will be tempted to take one of two paths, or to try and avoid something. What do I mean?

From Pisces TO Scorpio is nine signs. By the implied ‘9th harmonic’ (which sounds very grand but is pretty simple), the Sun’s metaphysical ‘connection’ to Saturn is one about furthering our education.

On the other side, from Saturn in Scorpio TO the Sun in Pisces is five signs – a 5th harmonic, if you please.

In astrology, nine is not a sign of ‘culmination’ as those of you who know numerology might think of it. That’s probably because astrology doesn’t work in base ten, as our everyday system of counting does. No, at it’s most simplistic, astrology works in base twelve – twelve signs. And yes, it also works in base thirty (thirty degrees to every sign) and base three-hundred-sixty (degrees in a circle).

And if you want to get really fancy about it, there’s also that ‘sixty seconds in a degree’ thing – which sounds really fussy but which is where our concept of time (sixty seconds to the minute and sixty minutes to the house) and astrology intersect.

And that concept – working in base sixty – comes from Babylon, the place all western astrology originally comes from. The ancient Babylonians worked in base sixty…which is good cause to wonder what they used after their fingers and toes.

In any case, nine – in modern astrology – is the ‘astro-vibe’ of learning. So daily life (the Sun) is going to be all about learning what this month?

Answer: Saturn in Scorpio stuff.

Meanwhile, five (and the 5th harmonic) is about ‘creativity and development.’ Many like to think of the 5th harmonic as being ‘the child’ as in ‘having children.’ But if you think about it, children are – in human terms – a primary ‘human creation’: we create more humans.

But then you have to raise them. You know…as a parent your job is to creatively develop a child’s sense of being a human being in this world?

Yet the 5th harmonic isn’t about children. It’s about the creating something from what we have. So whether that’s your physicality or that’s your talents, abilities or resources, the effort which goes into creating and developing those abilities are the 5th harmonic concept.

In fact, one of the reasons why parenting is such a tough job is because as a parent you’re not only in charge of creating and developing the life of the child, your primary job is to develop your Self so that you ARE a good parent who shows that child how to make (develop) something of your life, your abilities, your humanity, your talents – all that stuff.

And the reason all that is so important now is because what is ‘creatively developed’ through the 5th sign vibe is the Taurean or 2nd house sense of self worth, personal resources and self respect (or self worth), all of which is tested through…

Through what sign? SCORPIO.

A stained glass image of Scorpio as depicted in the

Cathedral of Lausanne in Switzerland

 
And that’s where Saturn – the symbol of reality, limits, loss, testing and slow, substantial growth through effort – is.

So this 9th house (trine) harmonic from the Sun TO Saturn is all about learning where and how our values work, and where and how our values, our self development, our efforts just aren’t up to par. Maybe with ourselves…maybe with others.

This is to be a testing month and a month of testing. And when it comes to the astro-crux of how tests work and taking them to heart, hardly anything gets to us like the combination of Pisces and Scorpio. Where Scorpio tests our values and ability or willingness to risk (or how smart or dumb we are to take on a given risk), Pisces is that boundless sense of emotionality which is not just feelings, but feeling our feelings, and feeling how we feel about our feelings.

This is pure water sign theory. As the first water sign in the zodiac, Cancer’s metaphysical image is the surf zone. Scorpio’s image is the swamp or the ice floe. But Pisces is the wide, open ocean, replete with ‘unfathomable’ oceanic depths.

On balance, we are going to see a lot of people trying to ‘control’ (Saturn in Scorpio) what happens now so that it comes out to their (5th sign harmonic liking). And that’s okay, particularly if you are learning something in the process or are achieving what you’re achieving through applying something you have learned.

However! This combination can also be one where people will try and avoid reality at all costs. This is a combination which is a fear-monger’s dream. (With two water signs involved, maybe their wet dream!) So we are going to see people fall into two very different camps – the ‘this can’t be done’ group and ‘this could work’ tribe.

Is there any sense to knowing which is which and which represents prudence and which represents a valid road forward? Probably yes, though not in the absolute. The big indicators to the ‘turn of (Saturn) events’ now are Deucalion on the Scorpio side and Kalypso, Fomalhaut and Neptune on the Sun side of things.

The pairing of Deucalion-Saturn, though it may take many forms, is fairly direct: is XYZ being done in a moral and ethical manner?

Or maybe this, as an alternate…is everyone involved in any given situation, dynamic or question being given equal personal, ethical and moral consideration?

Sun-Kalypso-Fomalhaut-Neptune is a bit more squishy. But then, any time we see Neptune, things are a bit more nebulous – that’s the point! Fortunately, we do have two pretty obvious indicators in this quartet: Fomalhaut says ‘success depends on a lack of corrosion’ which means that we only succeed where our aims are not corrupt or corruptive.

Variations on the Fomalhaut theme: coercion, corruption, deception, obfuscation, lying.

We also have Kalypso in this mix, and Kalypso is about as Piscean a symbol as there is. (And hence, probably exalted in Pisces, though nobody that I know of is very big into signs of asteroid rulership as yet.) Kalypso is one of those beauteous babes Ulysses (aka Odysseus) encounters on his way back from the collective events known as Homer’s Iliad. His ship gets stranded on this foreign shore and the lovely Kalypso shows up to help the hero and (oh yes) his crew, too.

Predictably (this being Greek myth and all) Kalypso falls in love with Ulysses. But the thing is, he’s a married man. He’s got a wife and kidlets back home and he’s pining to get back to them.

Does Kalypso help him? Yes, she does. Why? Because she realizes that loving someone (in this case Ulysses) is about caring for them and caring about their happiness, however THEY define that.

It’s a romantic notion, yes. But it’s also a very Piscean base-line emotional truth. What we want from others is our fantasy. Our longing. Our version of hopes, dreams and fondest yearnings. But if we love them, then we want them to have a life which will make them happy – which may mean they walk away from us and we never see them again.

Ouch? Yes. But very Piscean in the sense that all the yearnings and the despair of Pisces, all the idyllic dreams and believing and spirituality…that’s all fine and good as our emotional dream…but that’s not necessarily reality.

Some of us even get to have or achieve our dreams and then we find out the reality of them really sucks! And that’s another form of Pisces – the reality of understanding that some things are better left as fantasies.

Pisces…the two fish which swim in two different directions…is about the reality of life. That life is about the dream and yet also about the reality. Accepting how different they are and how they sometimes do and often don’t mix, that is our Pisces life challenge.

 Pisces...the two fish going in different

directions connected by a golden cord.

Pisces is also a sign which has two rulers. We’ve talked about the ‘outcome’ ruler – Neptune – in its confluence with the Sun. But the ‘in door’ with Pisces, that’s Jupiter. And as the Sun reaches Pisces, Jupiter is still sitting at 6 Gemini, the degree it went direct at back on January 30th.

It seems worth mentioning that 6 Gemini was also the degree Jupiter was in when the Lance Armstrong bubble burst on Oprah Winfrey’s very public television stage…and after that, throughout the media world. The disillusionment, the fact that people were so unhappy with Lance’s having deceived them (never mind himself) that people have sued Lance Armstrong for simply not being the shining hero they wanted to think of him as? That’s so very Piscean!

What, we want life to come with a guarantee that we’ll never get lied to? Life doesn’t come with any permission slips which say ‘you get to be eternally naïve’ And that’s what Pisces is about as a sign…teaching us how to love innocence, but be careful of our naiveté. Naiveté as the ‘blank slate’ which empowers us to learn is a powerful thing. But naiveté which has us wanting to be blind is destructive.

That combination, that coming to grips with what life is and isn’t is the essence of the moment. Your experience of it may be large or small. It may be costly or merely inconvenient. It may be disappointing. Then again, you may feel empowered to know you are as good as the next guy and better than many.

Given the 9-5 harmonic swing (by sign) from Saturn’s station to the Sun, this could be the moment when you take a next step in the effort to build or develop your life. It may be when you stop feeling your own very human weaknesses in favor of valuing your vulnerabilities as the very sort of human strength which allows caring and compassion to exist.

They say only the very strong can afford to be vulnerable.

That may be why some consider Pisces not the strongest sign in the zodiac, but the most enduring, eternal and powerful in its potential.

And every chart includes Pisces.

It’s to think about.
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Sun in Aquarius

 John Singer Sargeant's Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (1889)

There are really a couple of ways to look at this year’s month-long Sun in Aquarius transit. What we do as astrologers is looking at ingresses to see what they can tell us...an ingress gives us a marker of influences at a certain point in time, when the cosmic clock strikes whatever it strikes...

...If you know where the rock fell in the pool, if you have some sense of when that rock fell and how big the rock was, that gives you a sense of what sort of ripples you will face if your body and your life are part of that pool

Which it is. We are all part of what exists - that's the big message delivered by E=mc2'd and all the rest of astrophysics.

What happens out there matters. What happens here on earth matters.

It's all part of the self same thing.

So saying...

....As the Sun enters Aquarius, we have asteroids Sappho and Hel just ahead and the Moon at 7 Leo, meaning it’s just passed the ‘Full Moon’ mark.

(Which yes, we know because yesterday’s post was all about the Full Moon!)

We also know that Aquarius is an air sign. So this month is going to be a month where we tend to think in terms of the ideas, concepts, trends, statistics, and likelihoods instead of the facts, evidence, current status and needs of the moment. This Aquarius tendency to postulate instead of consider the reality means we’re going to hear more about income as part of an economy than your landing a job.

What does this mean personally? Though irritating to listen to for many of us, this actually lightens our load because we now get the green light to postulate: what might I do? What could I learn? What kind of benefit should I be able to bring to your company if you give me the chance?

Doors are open now to theoretical discussions. Expect to have them, expect to hear them. And remember - theory gets wacky. Not everything everyone is likely to come out with is going to make sense.


And yet it's always rather revealing - about them, about us, about a world in which such things get said.

Against this, we all will need to put across or demonstrate our willingness to work. Some of us have dedicated track records - and tracks record of dedication. Then there are those who ‘skate by’ or who shuck or jive their way through life. On both sides - the validated and fake, some end up mighty and some end up with a life which is merely flighty.

The dividing line is whether we are found or found out. And whether we are willing to take the time and put in the effort to find ourselves and find out what we are truly capable of doing and being...not merely to or for ourselves, but for others. Maybe even for our world, for people we will never meet.

There are validations for doing big and doing little. There is a necessity to be who we are as individuals and be part of our world - however big or small - around us.

All this is likely to now take another step forward in the realm of getting shaken and sorted out. It may not all come about instantaneously, but it will happen...maybe to a big degree, and maybe as just a chip of one stone on a very large mountain face...but it will begin happening now. You may not recognize anything all that instantly. The changes may not be all that immediate. But they will happen in due time.

How do we know that? Well, that we know because of a

little TNO named Rhadamanthus you might remember reading about a couple of blogs ago (in the Astro-Factors blog for WE0122).

That Rhadamanthus goes retrograde at 20 Libra at 3:41am (UT/+0) means it’s already going into retrograde (reflective) mode as the Sun reaches Aquarius at 10:20am (UT/+0) on January 20th. And given that Rhadamanthus is an emblem of ‘consequence’ (that which now done, cannot be undone) we know that all sorts of things which have been ‘done’ are now becoming clear to us.

But it's not all that simple or something we consciously grapple with until it hits. Any object classed as a TNO refers to events, incidents and realizations we don't normally deal with. So as concerns Rhadamanthus, the question thus becomes not just 'what have you DONE for me/us lately?'...but 'what have you done which shows you know how to do what you do'...

....AND...
 
'whether you should have done what you did. Or still do.

It can even be....'in choosing what to learn, what path to take - or what people to associate with, did you choose correctly?'

Where we haven’t done what in retrospect would seem to be the 'right' thing...or where we haven't dealt with live realistically, perhaps even where we thought only of ourselves and not of those we would/could affect or how our actions might affect them....that's where the Aquarian ‘know the rules, learn the facts – then choose. Then move on!’ comes into ultimate play.

Aquarius is hell on those who don’t deal with realities. While known as a sign of ‘hopes, dreams and wishes,’ what Aquarius really embodies are those ‘if I do xyz, then I can….’ frameworks which require that yes, we DO the ‘xyz’ part first. In other words, you can’t have the party to celebrate the new job until you get the new job. And you can’t get that new job without applying for a job that you have the qualifications/willingness to do.

Yes, this is one of those fixed signs which tests our ability want the result so much that we put ourselves through the hassle of doing. And learning how to do. And honing our skills. And proving our worthiness –first and foremost to ourselves!

And that’s where the ‘fakery’ can come in. Saturn is Aquarius’ first ruler, Uranus the second. So you have to make the Saturn grade before you get to fly to the Uranus stars.

And Rhadamanthus retrograde, that just puts us in a place where we get what that means. Who we have been has gotten us to where we are. Like it or not (which for many of us would be ‘not!’), that’s where we start from now.

Okay. So that’s sort of the ‘usual’ approach to this Sun entering Aquarius thing. But the other part of the astrologer’s-astrological equation would be what happens while the Sun is in Aquarius? 

Yes, I know…you wanted me to do that ‘what it means to my Sun sign thing’ – what astrologers, for better or worse, call “cookbook astrology.” And here’s the deal with why you think that sounds a little funky. It is.

Why? Because what you ask for when you say ‘what does that mean to my Sun sign?’ is ‘what does that mean to – not my life – but to my life force. The Sun is energy. Call it will, call it vitality…it’s not your “life” per se. Yes, it can represent career – but only as a field. Saturn represents the accomplishment. And yes, the Sun can represent intellect – but Mercury is the thinking part: what you do with your intellect.

So though do the cookbook thing once in a while I don’t do it all the time. It bothers me that you would think that's the whole picture - it isn't. So today...? Maybe to honor the quirkiness which is so Aquarian or the Aquarian ‘new conceptualization’ vibe, today we’re going to look at the what else happens thing.

(And yes, you can comment and/or gripe all you want – no problem!)

But really…

...To the point of much of what we have been talking about, not only is the Sun entering Aquarius in the wake of a (duly blogged about) Solar Eclipse about changing times and changing life structures, but the two symbols OF societal, social and personal ‘structural’ growth, enlightenment and learning (Saturn and Jupiter) are both doing a celestial number while the Sun is passing through Aquarius.

On the Jupiter side we have a big red planet – the biggest planet in the whole solar system – moving into Aries. That means a couple of things:

One: Jupiter is currently at 29 Pisces, the last degree of the zodiac. The question thus becomes “what have we learned/what have we yet to learn?” You will hear and see this everywhere you go right now.

Two: In being in the last degree of the zodiac, Jupiter is revealing some pretty big chinks in our armor, holes in our plans and everything else you might go “OH NO!!” about.

Three: Once Jupiter commits to its transit of Aries on the 22nd, a natural whole-sign sextile will be set up between Sun in Aquarius and Jupiter in Aries. There are two basic concepts thus set up – the first being the 3rd sign harmonic set up from the Sun to Jupiter which asks us to choose, learn and to speak up about what isn’t working. This does not favor complaining, though there’s plenty of that likely to be going around! Yet the real point is that of seeing an opportunity in wherever you find or spot a gap, weakness or lack.

Think of life as a marketplace. Those gaps and lacks are exactly where a ‘new product’ success can be achieved.

The other harmonic here is from Jupiter to the Sun – and that’s an eleventh house dynamic…the very essence of Aquarius and Things Aquarian. For those looking to be (more) “successful” in whatever way, this pair of indicators is your ticket to adventure.

However! With that adventure comes some endeavor, courtesy of Saturn – a Saturn which come the 26th will go retrograde. More specifics will be forthcoming on this to be sure, but given that Saturn is going retrograde in Libra, that sets up a Sun-to-Saturn whole-sign 9th harmonic which would be all about (1.) moving ahead with new plans, working through the glitches and challenges which will surely surface along the way, and (2.) expanding one’s knowledge base and point of view.

One of the big tests during this next little while is going to be theory against fact – optimism against proven results. And guess which one is going to look foolish and which one is going to win?

Uh-huh….credibility now goes to the doers and provers, not the pie-in-the-sky believers and postulators. A lot of people are going to get called out on a lot of stuff this month. A lot of plans will fall through, a lot of vows will be shown up to be merely empty promises.

It is our job to learn from mistakes and move on. Wasting one’s time being furious is just that – a waste of time. And who are we really mad at? Once Saturn is in retrograde, the suggestion is that we’re really mad at ourselves for not having been more careful, more realistic, more savvy, more discerning.

Still, those who sit and fume stand to waste a relatively short (five month) window of bonafide opportunity.

The other side of this Saturn/Sun relationship is from Saturn to the Sun, a fifth sign harmonic which with Saturn in retrograde indicates a need to polish our skills and bone up on whatever ‘tools’ we need to move ahead.

As the Sun moves along though Aquarius, the tone of day-to-day life will change as the Moon, Mercury and Venus change signs. But nothing compares to the two celestial signposts we call Jupiter and Saturn.

No matter what Sun, Moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Ascendant, Nadir…or anything else you have in your chart, these concepts will hold. So ask yourself – what do YOU want to do with this month ahead?

After all, in the end, yours is the only answer which in your life, really counts...

 ...and so drops the rock into the pond.

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