A Question of Degree

The 29th degee with the 0 degree. Photo from http://www.divinedolphin.com/

I don’t know much about degrees. I know very little. I have heard of and read about critical and anaretic degrees but that’s all. It was a comment my friend Carl Karas made on my one of my Facebook statues recently that got me thinking about them. He mentioned how wistful I sound and he referred to my anaretic degrees. I have Mars at 29 50’ Taurus and Uranus at 28 59’ Libra. :: sotto voce:: I want to whine about this quinqunx but I’ll leave that out for now.

So anyways, what Carl said got me thinking about the 29^th degree. Astrologers I respect think it is in fact a significant degree. I’ll add a link at the bottom of this post and you can check it out there.  But you read so many varying things about it: it’s the penultimate degree of a sign so the expression is strong; it is almost into the other sign, so the expression is weak; it can’t make up its mind and then it plunges into some rash action.

What I think is that unless you were born with a planet there that is Rx or about to go Rx, that planet is going to progress very soon into the next sign. Especially if it is the fast-moving bodies we’re talking about. Picture this: You’re born with the Sun at 29 Scorpio and at Age 1 your progressed Sun moves to 0 Sag. Or you’re born with Venus at 10 Sag and at around Age 20, it progresses into Cap. You’re going to feel and remember that one, if your romantic and relationship style and needs undergo a change when you’re a young adult.

Before Synastry: A Very Basic Look at Charts

Touching someone's heart or looking into their soul is sacred. Do it with care and reverence.

Because I’m awfully lucky, I have a copy of Richard Idemon’s Through the Looking Glass: A Search for the Self in the Mirror of Relationships. The book is a transcript of a week-long seminar that Richard did and it has been edited into a book by another person I love to read, Howard Sasportas. In fact, it is the transcripts of seminars that Howard Sasportas and Liz Greene did that I really love more than the books either one of them wrote individually. Astrologers, all three of them, but also psychologists. And great minds. We owe them a lot.

There is so much treasure in Through a Looking Glass. The chapter on love where Richard talks about the four concepts of love that the Greek knew is something we all need to read and understand. Don’t they say that to understand all is to forgive all? Well, I think understanding also leads to the beginning of self-healing and I’d recommend this book just for that.

When I started my relationships’ classes with Dawn, one of the first things she taught was to look at the missing element or modality in a person’s chart because they will be strongly drawn to people who have what they are missing. Any good astrologer will tell you that before you do either prediction or synastry, you should look at the person’s chart and understand it well. Transits, progressions and synastry don’t happen in a discrete units, they interact with the chart and you have to read them like that. Which is why I don’t do readings: it’s too much work.

To get back to the point, Richard says the same thing: look at the chart, look at the dominant function, the inferior function, the singletons and which aspects predominate. By function he meant: element, modality, signs, house orientation and yin-yang balance. Look at that you’ll have a fairly good idea of the areas where someone over-compensates, represses and projects onto the other. Projects and draws them into their ambit.

On Love

Venus is going through my twelfth; and we’ve all just come out of its conjunction to Neptune and Chiron.  It’s still in Pisces, the sign of its exaltation.  The sign of surrender, of dissolving of the self into the infinite void.  I don’t know what Venus in Pisces is really like, but I have been thinking about love and here’s what I wrote while she drifts in my twelfth, while she drifts through the sign of the Fish:

Love cannot be forced, manipulated or extracted. Do any of that and you kill the magic, you break the fragile bubble that is love. It flows freely and picks its own direction. And all you can do is surrender. Maybe it’ll flow over you and then away; or maybe it’ll flow by you; or maybe you’ll be one of the lucky ones and it’ll bathe you in its glory forever.

There’s a great need in people for love, for romantic love. But I think we’re approaching this the wrong way when we pin it on someone and we pine. We pine, we suffer, we stumble, we curse, we cry. But why? I don’t see it like that anymore. I see it as an impersonal force that operates through us.  It doesn’t matter who you pin it on or whether you direct it at someone or not. It doesn’t matter whether we’re genetically programmed for it to perpetuate the species or if it’s a mystical surge in God’s heart that finds its way in ours.

A Small Scorpio Journey

Beloved Dotty (Pic by Ria Ray)

I’m in a little village at the foothills of the Himalayas right now. I cannot tell you how lovely it is here. The mountains radiate calm and serenity. The air is clean and perfumed. The pine trees are tall, dark and perfect. I’ve been here for about two weeks and all I’ve done is brood over death and loss and decay.

The new moon in Scorpio was in my eighth and the themes of this sign and house permeated this time for me. Perhaps not surprisingly because we came here to visit family and found illness, old age, a wounded beloved dog and vandalism to the place my husband calls home. But even before that, even before travelling, I worried about the safety of the cat I was leaving behind, my parents who are abroad, our journey through the mountain roads.  

Here Comes the Sun

I am the Sun. It is the heat generated in my core that makes all life possible. It is my light that makes this world and other worlds visible to you. I am all pervasive, visible to all; and even the blind who do not have sight feel my warmth on their face. When my heart collapses and my end comes, so will yours: my death is your death. I burn with a splendid fire and my power is so strong that planets pay their homage to me by spinning around me. I need no borrowed power, the energies of creation burn within me. I need no borrowed light, I am the light.

It is no coincidence that the Sun is exalted in Aries, a sign whose sacred words are “I am.” It takes great courage to announce who you are and there is nothing riskier than displaying your true self because rejection then can become a mortal blow to the soul. But once you announce who are, once you take a stand, then everything else falls into place. The world reorients itself around you and you see who your true allies are, and those who are your foes and what you need to do becomes clear.

To Moon in Gemini

You’re content stringing me along
Like a jangly toy whose sound you like
And I’m content, sometimes, to jangle by your side.

I’m fascinated by how you soul-bond
With your laptop
your papers
and your phone

And by how you’ll go to a dictionary
To nail the nuance of a word
But miss the heart of the person who said it

Neptune, get off my Mars!

I went crying to Mike recently. I do that lot, go crying to him. “Why,” I whined, “is my energy so low?” It was, too. Two weeks ago I sprained my neck, felt fatigued for no discernable reason and my will to engage in life faltered. Everything seemed too much, getting out of bed seemed too much. The doctors could see nothing wrong; my thyroid levels were normal.

One of the things Mike pointed out was that Neptune had just turned retrograde and was on its way to square my Mars again. I was reading recently that Mars is our will to power and you need it to engage in life. I have a highly aspected Mars and I identify with it more than anything else in my chart. Mess with it and you mess with me (and my chart) in a big way and here’s Neptune casting its foggy, damp, life-sucking influence all over the one planet I need the most.

Venus in Scorpio

Cast a spell
With a look
So deep, so intense

It burns the soul
And makes the heart yearn
For just a little bit more of you

And afraid
Of that light and of that passion
That run so very deep.

Scorpio Moon: Peeling the Layers

I’ve read a lot of things about the Scorpio Moon. It’s in its fall in this sign, it’s a difficult position, it’s deep and intense, it’s secretive, it’s regenerative, it’s suspicious, it goes through intense moods, it’s probing. It’s all true.

But have you ever been close to someone with this moon? Or rather is someone with this moon close to you? If they are, then have you noticed the Scorpio Moon pattern? Inevitably, if you spend enough time with them, they’re going to pull you deep into the intense emotional zone they live in. A moon driven to intensely look at and examine every emotion is going to make you do the same. They will take whatever it is and peel each layer and keep peeling till you’re both exhausted and sweating and naked. They get off on it, they need it. This intense communion of truth and revelation.

Scorpio Moon Urges

Go deep inside
When the pain comes
Let it consume you
Surrender
And go deep inside

Stand and stretch
Stretch as much as you can
And then stretch more
Stretch till you can’t anymore
And then let go and release