Journal

Pisces and the Meaning of Sacrifice

This is  a personal piece.

I have Sun and Mercury both in Pisces, and five planets in water signs in my chart. I think by emotion, and I feel my way into things. When I am dealing with ideas in astrology I am feeling for a certain sense of symmetry, balance and wholeness.

I’ve always been bugged by the usual definitions of Pisces, traditional and modern both. In some of the older material Pisces is the garbage bin of the zodiac, dissolute wastrels destined to come to an ill end.

In more modern material you will often read about how Pisces is a sign of self-sacrifice, giving oneself over to the larger whole. Part of me completely rebels against that idea. Inside I do not feel like the self-sacrificing type at all.

If anything, the inner feeling is the opposite.

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Wisdom of Saturn

On this coming March 19 I am going to be participating in an on-the-web conversation as part of Kepler College’s celebration of International Astrology Day. The theme for the day will be, astrology and spirituality.

That got me thinking.

I am just off doing a couple of blog posts on rethinking Saturn as feminine and Saturn as Crone, and what that entails. A commenter on one of the posts asked if I had considered looking at how viewing Saturn as feminine works out in chart interpretation.

That also got me thinking, and the two topics dovetailed.

To really get a sense of how Saturn as feminine changes how we do chart interpretatation, I think we need to have a very good grasp of the deep knowing compassion of age – in my last post I labeled that quality, Understanding.

That is the subject of this meditation.
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Saturn as Feminine and Crone

This is the second post in which I am exploring the ramifications of viewing Saturn as feminine, and also considering symbolism related to Saturn as Old Crone.

In my previous post on Saturn as Feminine I quoted a passage from the Hellenistic astrologer Dorotheus, in which Saturn is classified as one of the feminine planets. This created some striking arrangements of Saturn with the other planets, having some of the distinctive symmetry and balance of much of traditional Western astrology.

In this post I want to consider further how the symbolism of Saturn is linked to feminine symbolism.

Here is the quote from Carmen Astrologicum by Dorotheus:

“…the feminine planets are Saturn, Venus and the Moon, the masculine ones are the Sun, Jupiter, and Mars.”

When I first saw this quote I wondered if Saturn might originally have been associated with an Old Crone goddess figure or figures, that then was turned masculine in a later cultural development.

What I want to do in this post is to consider the nature of Saturn and feminine symbolism, and see how they combine.

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Saturn as Feminine, Part One

The is the first of two posts on this topic.

I am in the process of gathering data for a class I am developing on essential dignities. I was looking back through the book Carmen Astrologicum by Dorotheus, which is one of the earliest texts we have from the Hellenistic era that give information on how astrology was actually practiced during the period of the Hellenistic synthesis.

Early in the text I came across this rather striking statement (page 8 in the Astrology Classics edition, near the bottom of the page):

“…the feminine planets are Saturn, Venus and the Moon, the masculine ones are the Sun, Jupiter, and Mars.”

Saturn is usually thought of as a masculine planet, and here we have this statement in a very early text where (s)he is listed as feminine. Hmm…

I had seen that statement before and noted it in the margin. This time I decided to pursue the metaphor of Saturn as feminine a bit further, and see what sort of light it sheds on traditional astrology.

What I came up with is very interesting and striking, and I want to share my findings here.

Continue reading “Saturn as Feminine, Part One”

Detriment and Fall

It is common to hear modern astrologers criticize the traditional astrology concepts of debility, detriment and fall.

For those of you who do not use these interpretive terms, a planet in a sign opposite to the one it rules is in detriment, and a planet opposite its exaltation sign is said to be in fall. To be in rulership or exaltation is called being dignified, and to be in detriment or fall is called being debilitated. In traditional astrology both detriment and fall will tend to hinder or create problems in the expression of that planet.

There is much criticism of the negative connotations of these terms, and much insistence that a planet in a debilitated state can be a strong asset in a chart. Let a planet just be as it is; any sign placement of any planet can be used positively.

What I maintain here is that the concepts of debility, detriment, and fall can give useful information as to how a planet will play out in a person’s life. They can provide useful information on how to deal with the planet’s expression.

To illustrate that, I want to take a detailed look at a debilitated planet I know very well from experience – Mercury in Pisces in my own natal chart.

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What I’m Trying to Do Here

This is the first post for calendar year 2016, so it seems like a good time to rethink for myself the purpose of my writing here.

Credit where credit is due – this piece was triggered by reading a phenomenal blog entry by John Michael Greer on his occult blog, The Well of Galabes. This particular piece is titled The Twilight of the Neopagan Era.

He chronicles how we are at the end of a pop culture version of the Neopagan and Occult communites, and as that fades, serious committed followers of neopagan paths will need to weed out the core of their practice from the pop trappings, the candles, unicorns and medieval costumes.

I am a child of that era.

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Rethinking Spiritual Transformation

This post was triggered by an incident a friend of mine told me. (*Please see the note at the end of this post.)  She had a sense of foreboding and ill fortune, and visited an astrologer. She found out that the transit going on was Pluto opposition Sun, and the astrologer told her, Don’t worry, you’re just having a spiritual transformation.

It turns out that “spiritual transformation” was a diagnosis of stage 2 breast cancer.

The point I wish to make here is that the astrologer was correct in what my friend ended up experiencing, and completely false and misleading in the statement she was trying to make.

What the astrologer meant was something like – oh, don’t worry, nothing bad is going to happen to you, this is just a Spiritual Experience.

She meant Spiritual as opposed to something real or physical. No threat there.

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A Study in Aversion

This post is about the traditional astrology concept of aversion, and how it plays out in interpreting a chart. I used this example in the webinar I did for Kepler on October 24 of this year, and it intrigued me enough that I want to study it a bit more closely here.

In traditional astrology aspects are primarily by whole sign, and the only aspects that are used are the classical Ptolemaic aspects – sextile, square, trine, opposition.

Signs that are not in a classical aspect with each other – either 30 degrees or 150 degrees – are said to be in aversion, meaning they are turned away from each other, out of the line of vision and hence out of contact.

Aversion as an interpretive concept can play out in some interesting and significant ways, and here we are going to look at the chart of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.

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Ladder of the Planets

My practice of astrology today is based on what I learned during a period of several years in which I confined myself to rules and techniques from traditional astrology. As part of that, I eliminated the 3 modern outer planets from my practice. Obviously this also means that I used only the traditional rulerships, where Mars rules Scorpio, Saturn rules Aquarius, and Jupiter rules Pisces. There is a beauty, symmetry and power to the traditional rulership system, with the planets arranged in pairs around the two lights, Sun and Moon, in the order of their distance from the Sun.

During the past year I have been exploring, and re-discovering, some of the techniques and viewpoints of modern western astrology.  Along with that study, I now place a very high priority on having the different approaches to astrology all respect and learn from each other. While at one point I was convinced that traditional astrology was superior, I now think that was arrogance on my part, and that the different astrology systems are each different points of view, and have their own respective strengths and weaknesses.

So, as a (mostly) traditional astrologer, I want to be able to dialog with modern astrologers, speak their language, and use the best of their techniques and insights.

That means coming to terms with the modern planetary rulerships, where Scorpio is now ruled by Pluto, Aquarius is ruled by Uranus, and Pisces is ruled by Neptune. That is the system used by most of the astrologers I know. The problem is, introducing those new rulers disturbs the symmetry and integrity of the traditional system, and that is far more important than you might think if you don’t have experience in traditional astrology.

However, if I am going to dialog with modern astrologers, I need to be able to speak the language of modern rulerships, so I always have my eye out for a framework in which I can make sense of modern rulerships while still keeping the symmetry of the original system intact.

I think I have found an interesting and possibly fruitful approach, and I want to examine it here.

Continue reading “Ladder of the Planets”