The Sky Within

 

 

Planet	Sign	Position	House		House Cusps
Sun	Capricorn	25°Cp08'	09th		01  13°Ta48'
Moon	Pisces	19°Pi35'	11th		02  12°Ge23'
Mercury	Aquarius	11°Aq45'	10th		03  05°Ca25'
Venus	Pisces	10°Pi33'	11th		04  28°Ca12'
Mars	Gemini	21°Ge54' R	02nd		05  25°Le01'
Jupiter	Taurus	01°Ta10'	12th		06  00°Li25'
Saturn	Sagittarius	25°Sg21'	08th		07  13°Sc48'
Uranus	Aries	03°Ar57'	12th		08  12°Sg23'
Neptune	Virgo	00°Vi54' R	05th		09  05°Cp25'
Pluto	Cancer	17°Ca08' R	03rd		10  28°Cp12'
Midheaven	Capricorn	28°Cp12'	10th		11  25°Aq01'
Ascendant	Taurus	13°Ta48'	01st		12  00°Ar25'

 

 

THE SKY WITHIN

by Steven Forrest

 

Using Your Birthchart as a Spiritual Guide

A woman has a baby and is blissful about it. Another one does the same, and spends the rest of her life dreaming about how she might have been a ballerina. The same choice: having a kid. But only one smiling woman.

Nobody has a generic formula for happiness, at least not one that does the trick for everyone. That's where astrology comes in.

The birthchart, stripped to bare bones, is simply a description of the happiest, most fulfilling life that's available to you... personally. It spells out a set of strategies you can use to avoid boring routines, bad choices, and dead ends. It lists your resources. And it talks about how your life looks when you're misusing the resources and distorting the strategies -- shooting yourself in the foot, in other words.

All from a map of the sky?

Hard to believe. But think for a minute...

"How can the planets possibly affect us? They're millions of miles away." Astrology's critics are fond of rolling out that argument. But it doesn't hold water. Go out and gaze at the moon. What's really happening? Incomprehensible energies are plunging across a quarter million miles of void, crashing through your eyeballs and creating electrochemical changes in your brain. We call the process "seeing the moon." Certainly the planets affect us. The question is where do we draw the boundaries around those effects?

Let's go a step further.

Open your eyes on a starry night. What do you see? A vast, luminous space, full of shadows and light. Now close your eyes so tight they ache. Where are you now? What do you see? Again, a vast, luminous space, full of shadows and light. Consciousness and cosmos are structured around the same laws, follow the same patterns, and even feel pretty much the same to our senses.

"As above, so below." Just as the starry night awes us with its vastness, there's something infinitely deep inside you, a place you go when you close your eyes, a place that's beyond being an Aries or a Gemini or even a specific gender. At the most profound level, a birthchart is a map back to that magical center. It describes a series of earthly experiences which, if you're brave and open enough, will trigger certain states of consciousness in you -- states that operate like powerful spiritual catalysts, vaulting you into higher levels of being.

In the pages that follow, you'll tour your personal birthchart. But don't expect the usual "Scorpios are sexy" stuff. You are a mysterious being in a mysterious cosmos. You're here for just a little while, a blink of God's eye. You face a monumental task: figuring out what's going on! In that spiritual work, astrology is your ally. How will it help?

Certainly not by pigeon-holing you as a certain "type."

Astrology works by reminding you who you are, by warning you about the comforting lies we all tell ourselves, and by illuminating the experiences that trigger your most explosive leaps in awareness.

After that, the rest is up to you.

 

YOUR TEN TEACHERS

Freud divided the human mind into three compartments: ego, id, and superego. Astrologers do the same thing, except that our model of the mind differs from Freud's in two fundamental ways. First, it's a lot more elaborate. Instead of three compartments, we have ten: Sun, Moon, and the eight planets we see from Earth. As we'll discover, each planet represents more than a "circuit" in your psyche. It also serves as a kind of "Teacher," guiding you into certain consciousness-triggering kinds of experience.

The second difference between astrology and psychology is that astrology's mind-map, unlike Freud's, is rooted in nature itself, just as we are.

The primary celestial teacher is the Sun. What does it teach? Selfhood. Vitality. How to keep the life-force strong in yourself. If the Sun grew dimmer, so would all the planets -- they shine by reflecting solar light. Similarly, if you fail to stoke the furnaces of your own inner Sun, then you'll simply be "out of gas." All your other planetary functions will suffer too.

How do we learn this teacher's lessons?

Start by realizing that when you were born the Sun was in Capricorn.

Tell the truth about Capricorn and you start sounding like a voice out of the Boy Scout Handbook.  Here are the key concepts: integrity,  character,  morality,  a sense of personal honor.  Those are the Sea-Goat's evolutionary themes.  They all boil down to the capacity of will to dominate every other aspect of our natures, including emotion.

The Capricornian part of you needs to begin by asking itself one critical question: In the part of my life touched by the Sea-Goat, what is the highest truth I know?  The rest is simple... at least simple to understand.  Just live it.  Keep a stiff upper lip, and do what's right.

But be careful.  There's nothing wrong with expressing feelings as long as they're not doing your decision-making for you.  If you're tempted to do something wicked, don't be afraid to mention it.  Otherwise, half the world will think you're a saint while the other half thinks you're a pompous ass.  And neither half will get within a light-year of your human heart.

With your Sun in Capricorn, you feed your elemental vitality through one all-consuming activity: the accomplishment of Great Works.  They may be public -- like building a career that reflects the best of what you are -- or they may be private, like quietly doing what's right for yourself regardless of social or practical pressures.

Capricorn is the sign of the Hermit, and accordingly, there is a theme of solitude in your life.  That doesn't mean loneliness.  The Sea-goat's solitude has more to do with self-sufficiency and privacy.  It's certainly healthy for you to love; it's neediness on your part that leads inevitably toward frustrating emotional isolation.

You're a survivor, an endurer.  Those are fine qualities, and when life is hard, you'll shine.  Careful you don't use them inappropriately: when you're sad or frightened, express it.  Otherwise, you put yourself in pointless emotional exile.

We can take our analysis of your natal Sun a step further. When you were born, that solar light illuminated the Ninth house. What does that signify?

Start by realizing that Houses represent twelve basic arenas of life. There's a House of Marriage, for example, and a House of Career. Always, we find an element of "fate" in our House structures; the "Hand of God" continually presents us with existential and moral questions connected with our emphasized Houses. How we react and what we learn -- or fail to learn -- is our own business.

One brief technical note: Sometimes the Sun, the Moon, or a planet lies near the end of the House. We then say it's "conjunct the cusp" of the subsequent House, and interpret it as though it were a little further along... in the next House, in other words.

The House of Long Journeys over Water -- that's one old name for this part of the birthchart.  Since you have energy focused here a fortune-teller would say, "I see travel in your stars."  True enough, although a deeper way of expressing the same notion is that immersing yourself in cultures outside the one into which you were born is a pivotal spiritual catalyst for you.

There are other kinds of catalytic journeys.  Getting a wide education, formally or informally, is one.  So is anything that breaks up the normal routines of life and thought.  Even learning to hang-glide.

Ultimately, in the Ninth House you weave a grand scheme of life's meaning and purpose, at least your own version of it.  This is the House of Religion... provided we recognize that many major world religions have no churches or temples.  Cynicism is one such religion.  Existentialism, Materialism, and Science are others, not to mention Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism and so on.

With the Sun in the Ninth House, you have to pack the experiences of two or three lifetimes into a single lifetime.  That means being willing to say good-bye to safe havens, to avoid the human tendency to drift into routines.  The motif of the Quest is strong in your destiny-pattern.  It manifests as travel, but also as a search for knowledge and meaning.  Trust yourself; don't be seduced by "practicality"; above all, recognize that we're all just pilgrims in this world, here for a moment, then gone, carrying only what our souls have managed to digest.

The next step in our journey through your birthchart carries us to the Moon.

As you might expect, Luna resonates with the magical, emotional sides of your psyche. It represents your mood, averaged over a lifetime. As the heart's teacher, it tells you how to feel comfortable, how to meet your deepest needs. While the Sun lets you know what kinds of experiences and relationships help you feel sane, the Moon is concerned with another piece of the puzzle: feeling happy.

When you were born, the Moon was in Pisces.

Transcendence.  Mysticism.  Spirituality.  That's Pisces at its best.  In this part of your life, you've been given an instinctive sense of mystery and vastness.  Something there seems automatically to think in terms of centuries, of high purposes, of divine interventions.  Reflexively, when faced with life's vicissitudes, it asks, "What will this matter in five hundred years?"

That's the soul of spirituality.  It's also dangerous.  Transcendence can run amuck, leaving Pisces in an uncaring, drifting mode, "transcending" while its life descends into entropy.  Along that road there are some sad waystations: forgetfulness, spaciness, then escapism -- perhaps into alcohol or drugs, perhaps into food, maybe into the television set.

Avoid those sorry journeys by feeding your Piscean circuitry exactly what it needs: meditative time, silence, a few minutes each day to sit in the infinite cathedral.

With your Moon in Pisces, you have an instinctive sense of the presence of Spirit, although you may give it other names and explanations: mystery, higher levels of consciousness, spaciousness.  Call that experience what you will, if you are going to be comfortable in this world, you need to leave it every now and then, allowing yourself to enter a kind of trance... and that process too goes by many names: meditation, prayer, staring out the window.  Sometimes people who enter it call themselves artists seeking creative inspiration.  Other times, they're bird watchers waiting hours for a rare sighting.  Or amateur astronomers gazing at the wispy arms of a faint galaxy.  Or photographers waiting for the dawn light to be exactly right...

If you don't take care of your Moon, you'll find yourself slipping into a lackadaisical state in which nothing motivates you except maybe pain.  That kind of uncaring laziness is not your true nature, but it is the major "occupational hazard" that goes along with this lunar position.

Going farther, we see that your Moon lies in the Eleventh house of your chart.

What do you want out of life?  What are your priorities?  What kind of old person are you in the process of becoming?  Those are core Eleventh House issues.  The challenge here is to accomplish something many people talk about but few actually do--lead a life; that is, create your future according to your deepest interests and values.

The planetary forces focused in this segment of your birthchart are Teachers dedicated to helping you find the threads of your destiny.  They describe what you were born to become -- and warn you of how you look when you're off course.

"House of Friends" is the old name for this part of the birthchart, although "House of Acquaintances" is perhaps more accurate.  Intimacy isn't the issue here; teamwork and networking are.  But clear priorities must come first, or all those talking faces serve no purpose.  They just tie you up in pointless social interactions.

With the Moon in the Eleventh House, you have uncanny "political" instincts -- and whenever more than two or three people get together to try to accomplish something, we have "politics!"  Your destiny lies with processes that spill over the boundaries of your own life and your own powers and interact with the destinies of other people; you are a team player by fate, if not by taste.  As you mature, you will become more and more lunar -- that is, more emotionally expressive and probably more creative.  In you, there is a softening that comes with time.  If you get six out of every ten existential questions right, that's good news.  Do worse, and you'll do a slow drift in the direction of moodiness, prickliness, and maudlin self-indulgence.

There's a third critical piece in your astrological puzzle -- the Ascendant, or rising sign. Along with the Sun and Moon, it completes the "primal triad." What is it? What does it mean? Simple -- the Ascendant is the sign that was coming up over the eastern horizon at the instant of your birth. It's where the sun is at dawn, in other words. In exactly the same way, the Ascendant represents how you "dawn" on people -- that is, how you present yourself. It's your "style," or your "mask."

The ascendant means more than that. It symbolizes a way you can help yourself feel centered, at ease, comfortable with who you are. If you get its message, then something wonderful happens: your style hooks you into the world of experience in a way that feeds your spirit exactly the kinds of events and relationships you need. Your soul is charged with more enthusiasm for the life you're living -- and you feel vibrant, confident, and full of animal grace.

When you took your first breath, Taurus was lifting over the eastern horizon of Atlanta,GA. Let's begin our analysis by considering the meaning and spiritual message of the sign of "The Naturalist".

Ease, calm, naturalness -- those are the spiritual goals of the Bull.  Silence too.  But not just the kind that comes from keeping your mouth closed.  The Bull's silence is deeper: it's a quiet heart.  Feel the wind in your hair.  Feel the efficiency of your body, the rightness of its rhythms, the easy intelligence of your cells and muscles.  That's Taurus.  The part of you that's learning the lessons of the Bull is getting more grounded, more present, more receptive to immediate reality.  As a result, it has a physical orientation and a practical feeling.  It's not so interested in abstract flights of speculation.  It avoids the metaphysical Disneylands that seem to fascinate so many people.  It specializes in the wordless mysticism of ordinary life.

Feed your Taurean side with hands-on work: gardening, crafting wood or cloth, communing with animals.  Soothe it with music.  Restore and renew it with time spent close to nature -- in the forest, in the mountain valley, by the ocean.  Dress it in blue jeans and flannel.  And never, ever, ask it to go to a cocktail party!

With Taurus on the ascendant, your outward personality tends to be earthy and solid.  Instinctively, people trust you and feel comforted by your presence.  That's true even if you happen to be in lunatic mode that day -- people still see a serene surface.  Something in your aura seems to tell people to relax, to be real, to quit pretending to be Madonna or Donald Trump.

What have we learned so far? Quite a lot. Astrologers use the primal triad of Sun, Moon, and Ascendant in much the same way people who know just a little astrology use Sun signs. The difference is that while there are only twelve Sun signs, there are 1728 different combinations of all three factors. So when we say that you are a Capricorn with the Moon in Pisces and Taurus rising, that's a very specific statement.

Here's a way to make those words come even more alive. Traditionally, signs are connected with Bulls and Sea-Goats and Scorpions -- creatures we don't see every day. But we can translate those images into more modern archetypes.

We can say you are "The Authority", or "The Prime Minister", or "The Boss". Those are just different ways of saying you have the Sun in Capricorn.

We can say you have the soul of "The Mystic", or "The Poet", or "The Dreamer"... your Moon lies in Pisces, in other words.

We can add that you wear the mask of "The Naturalist", or "The Elf", or "The Silent One". Those images capture the spirit of your Ascendant, which is Taurus.

You can combine those archetypes any way you want. And you can go further: Once you have a feel for the three basic signs in your primal triad, you can make up your own images to go with them. Whatever words you choose, those simple statements are your fundamental astrological signature. It's your skeleton. Our next step is to begin adding flesh and hair to that skeleton by considering the planets.

 

Unsurprisingly, planets can gain prominence in a birthchart through association with the Sun, Moon, or Ascendant. These three are power brokers, and any linkage with them boosts a planet's influence.

A planet can gain authority by sharing a House with the Moon. We find that situation in your chart. Venus is bathing in moonlight, occupying the Eleventh House along with Luna.

Venus is the part of your mental circuitry that's concerned with releasing tension and maintaining harmony. Its focus is always peace, inwardly and outwardly. As such, it represents your aesthetic functions -- your taste in colors, sounds, and forms. Why? Because the perception of beauty soothes the human heart. Venus is also tied to your affiliative functions -- your romantic instincts, your sense of courtesy or diplomacy, your taste in friends. Invariably, this planet has one goal: sustaining your serenity in the face of life's onslaughts.

Venus was passing through Pisces. Thus, both your aesthetic sensitivity and your taste in partners is shaped by the mystical, dream-like spirit of the Fishes. In the realm of beauty, whether natural or wrought by human hands, you have a taste for the fantastical, for the romantic, for the spiritual. The same goes for friends and sexual partners -- you appreciate individuals with vivid imaginations, a sense of magic, and a willingness to explore their own consciousness.

With Venus in the Eleventh House, as you mature, your Venusian energies figure more prominently in your character and situation. That suggests a trend toward more prosperity, more comfort, and better fortunes in the world of intimacy as the years go by. There is an artist in you, but it's a late-bloomer... even if that truth is veiled by lesser successes earlier in life. Is all that guaranteed? Yes... provided you don't cancel it by slipping under the thumb of the dark Venus, descending into laziness, self-indulgence, and escapism.

Your birthchart displays another area of heightened activity: the Twelfth House. The reason for that is simple -- there's a lot of planetary activity. With Jupiter and Uranus in that area of your life, it is charged with activity, soul lessons, and opportunities for personal development. Before we even consider the planets separately, our first step is to explore this piece of existential real estate in broad terms.

Slipping the bonds of ego, letting consciousness expand beyond the narrow framework of personality -- that's the terrain of the Twelfth House.  A planet here stands between you and higher states of consciousness, not as an obstacle but as a bridge.  For that reason, it's helpful to view such a planet as your "Guru" or "Master Teacher."

The very existence of a planet in this part of your chart tells us that in this lifetime you're ready for a quantum leap in awareness.  But to accomplish that, you must practice a very specific "yoga."  What yoga?  That depends on the planets involved.

Before we identify that spiritual discipline, there's one more point -- your planetary "guru" is rather insistent.  If you avoid the methods the Teacher suggests, your poor ego will take some hard knocks.  To the old astrologers, this was the "House of Troubles."  That's a fair description of what's in store for us if we choose to maintain our usual attachments, ignoring the call of the inner worlds.

Take all the planets, all the meteors, moons, asteroids, and comets. Roll them up in a big ball of cosmic mush. They still wouldn't equal the mass of the "King of the Gods" -- Jupiter. Exactly that same bigness pervades the planet's astrological spirit. Jupiter is the symbol of buoyancy and generosity, of opportunity and joy. At the deepest level, it represents faith... faith in life, that is, rather than faith in anybody's theological position papers.

Jupiter stands in Taurus. This is an important piece of information -- maybe a pivotal one. Being human is tough sometimes. When you need to boost your elemental faith in life, your answer lies in following the Way of the Earth Spirit. In other words, you need to go recharge your batteries by sitting quietly in the woods or digging in your garden or curling up with your cat. Anything earthy and simple will do.

In your chart, the "King of the Gods" reigns in the Twelfth House -- traditionally the "House of Troubles," but actually the House of higher consciousness. Spiritually you have reached a point in the inner journey in which you need to learn lessons about radical faith. That is to say, in order to enter higher levels of being, you must first be willing to take chances in the world... such as traveling to a Sacred Site, even if you can't afford it. Again and again, Spirit will ask you one simple question: "Do you trust me?"

If Uranus were the only planet in the sky, we'd all be so independent we'd still be Neanderthals throwing rocks at each other. There would be no language, no culture, no law. On the other hand, if Uranus did not exist, we'd all still be hauling rocks for Pharaoh. All individuality would be suppressed. This is the planet of individuation... the process whereby we separate out who we are from what everybody else wants us to be. Always it indicates an area of our lives in which, to be true to ourselves, we must "break the rules" -- that is, overcome the forces of socialization and peer pressure. In that part of our experience, what feeds our souls tends to annoy mom and dad... and all the "moms" and "dads" who lay down the law of the tribe.

With Uranus in Aries, the process of individuation for you is tied up with the Path of the Warrior. That is to say, you strengthen and clarify your own Uranian identity through undertaking adventures -- and without them you're likely to become merely touchy. Consciously chosen stress, such as expeditions or high-stakes sports, purifies your sense of self, purging out the spurious "inner voices" you've swallowed sitting in front of the great wraparound television set of the late twentieth century Industrial Culture.

House of Troubles -- that's the old name for the Twelfth House, where your Uranus lies. Fortunately, the issues are broader; this part of the natal chart is the House of Spirituality... unless we resist it--then we see the "Troubles." Uranus is your Teacher here, and the lessons can be summarized this way: your inner guru doesn't believe in gurus! You have reached a place on the path where there is much emphasis upon learning to think for yourself, independently of any collective spiritual position papers. In a nutshell, to be true to your spirit, you must assert your individuality, choosing an inner path that involves some outward social costs.

In the final analysis, all planets are important. Each one plays a unique role in your developmental pattern, and failure to feed any one of them results in a diminution of your life. Just because the following planets aren't "having breakfast with the President" through association with the Sun, Moon, or Ascendant doesn't mean we can ignore them.

Pale red Mars suggested blood to our ancestors, and they named it the War God. That's an effective metaphor -- Mars does represent violence. But today we go further. The red planet symbolizes the power of the Will. Assertiveness. Courage. Without it, there'd be no fire in life. No spark. Where your Mars lies, you are challenged to find the Spiritual Warrior inside yourself, the part of you that's brave and clear enough to claim your own path and follow it.

Mars is vibrating in Gemini. When circumstances contrive to rob you of variety and mental stimulation, the Warrior inside you rises up and starts throwing Molotov cocktails. When you're bored, you're mean, in other words. Spiritually you're learning how to engineer -- forcefully, if necessary -- a fascinating, varied life, full of encounters with amazing strangers and astounding experiences.

With the War-God occupying your Second House, you prove yourself to yourself through the rituals of adventure and assertiveness. You need to develop confidence in the legitimacy and prowess of the Warrior within you. Maybe you need a karate class. Maybe you need to start your own business. Maybe it's time to hike across Crete -- or to tell a domineering friend to back off.

Mercury buzzes around the Sun in eighty-eight days, making it the fastest of the planets. It buzzes around your head in exactly the same way: frantically. It's the part of you that never rests -- the endless firing of your synapses as your intelligence struggles to organize a picture of the world. Mercury represents thinking and speaking, learning and wondering. It is the great observer, always curious. It represents your senses themselves and all the raw, undigested data that pours through them.

Mercury is chafing in Aquarius. This combination links your mental functions with the rebellious, authority-questioning logic of the Exile archetype. Reflexively, your intelligence rebels against conformity, against the blind stupidity of the herd. Spiritually you are learning about the electric shock of genius -- and about its loneliness.

With the traditional "Messenger of the Gods" occupying your Tenth House, your "cosmic job description" is Communicator or Teacher. That means that you were born with something significant to say to the human family. You may write it. You may broadcast it. You may announce it from a soapbox. But before you can pull it off, you'll need to unravel a riddle Life has set before your spirit: How to find your true voice?

You're lying in your bed, going to sleep. Suddenly a jolt runs through your body. You just "caught yourself falling asleep." Where were you two seconds before the jolt? What were you? Astrologically, the answer lies with Neptune. This is the planet of trance, of meditation, of dreams. It represents your doorway into the "Not-Self." Based on the sign the planet occupies, we identify a particularly critical spiritual catalyst for you... although we need to remember that Neptune remains in a Sign for an average of a little over thirteen years, so its Sign position actually describes not only you, but your whole generation. Its House position, however, is more uniquely your own.

Neptune was passing through Virgo. Thus, to trigger higher states of consciousness in yourself and to stimulate your psychic development, you may choose to follow the Path of the Servant... that is consciously, intentionally to seek the perfection of those skills and virtues in yourself which benefit others. Without exposure to the purifying, soul-bleaching effects of selfless service, you tend to drift away from Spirit, losing yourself in the mazes of daily life -- or in the subtle ego-traps of meditation.

Neptune, planet of transcendence, occupies the Fifth House of your birthchart, where its mystical feelings are linked to your creativity and playfulness. A basic "yoga" you need to practice in this lifetime lies in experiencing the "creative trance" -- that curious state all artists know in which the conscious mind simply gets out of the way and allows the unconscious to speak. By allowing yourself to receive creative inspiration, you establish rapport with the secret realms of your own soul... and more than artistic imagery will flow up that road. Spiritual illumination will too.

"Life's a bitch. Then you die." Go to any boutique from coast to coast; you'll find those words on a coffee mug. Meaninglessness. Like most truly frightening ideas, we make a joke of it. That's Plutonian territory: the realm of all that terrifies us so badly we need to hide from it. Death. Disease. Our personal shame. Sexuality, to some extent. Initially, Pluto asks us to face our own wounds, squarely and honestly. Then, if we succeed, it offers us a way to create an unshakable sense of meaning in our lives. How? Methods vary according to the Signs and Houses involved, but always they have one point in common: the high Plutonian path invariably involves accepting some trans-personal purpose in your life.

One more point: Pluto moves so slowly that it remains in a given Sign for many years. As result, its Sign position in your birthchart refers not only to you but also to your generation. The House position, however, is much more personal in its relevance.

Pluto was journeying slowly through the sign Cancer. Thus the shadow material you are called upon to face has to do with the dark side of the Crab archetype: hiding from life. In what part of your life or personal history have you chosen safety over experience, the appearance of love over the steamy reality of shared growth, security over magic? (If you answer is "Nowhere!" then congratulations... you're Enlightened... or not looking hard enough.)

At the moment of your birth, Pluto stood in the Third House... the part of the birthchart that addresses questions of perception. Spirit has blessed you with the sharp, penetrating eye of the truth-seer. To create a sense of meaning in your life, you need to accept your role as Teacher... and that doesn't mean Preacher! Your task is not so much to answer questions as to raise them. Where there are lies agreed upon, such as racial or gender prejudices, you have the skills -- and bear the burden -- of the truth-sayer.

Look at a NASA photo of Saturn. The icy elegance of the planet's rings, the pale understatement of the cloud bands... both hint at the clarity and precision which characterize Saturn's astrological spirit. Part of the human psyche must be cold and calculating, cunning enough to survive in the physical world. Part of us thrives on self-discipline, seeks excellence, pays the price of devotion. Somewhere in our lives there's a region where nothing but the best of what we are is enough to satisfy us. That's the high realm of Saturn. In its low realm, we take one glance at those challenges and our hearts turn to ice. We freeze in fear, and despair claims us.

The boundary-shattering terrain of Sagittarius offers a region of profound spiritual challenge for you, as Saturn was passing through that sign at your birth. You must learn to steel yourself in the face of the Archer's shadow side: a tendency to spend years denying one's natural need for risk and adventure, only to release it all in one glorious existential pratfall. Will yourself toward a robust engagement in life. And support that journey in practical, Saturnian terms by fortifying yourself with the concrete skills and strategies a gambler needs in order to survive -- especially ones pertinent to Saturn's House in your birthchart. Which House was that?

The Eighth! The arena of life where you face the Unconscious, and all the half-taboo energies that lie there: your sexuality, your sense of mortality, and your instincts about "other dimensions." With Saturn here, your Eighth House passions are so strong they probably frighten you a bit. Concentrate on conquering that fear and extending yourself step by step into those mysterious realms. Otherwise, your intimate life will be frustrating, death will haunt you, and there will be a big hole in your life where magic should be.

 

Your Lunar Nodes

The soul's journey

Here's a jolly baby. Here's a serious one. An alert one. A dull one. A wise one. Those are common nursery room observations, but they raise a fascinating question: How did that person get in there?

Most of our psychological theory, either technically or in folklore, is developmental theory... abuse a child and he'll grow up to be a child-abuser, for example. But in the eyes of the newborn infant, there is already character. How can that be? One might say it's heredity, and that's certainly at least part of the answer. A large part of the world's population would call it reincarnation -- that baby, for better or worse, represents the culmination of centuries of soul-development in many different bodies. A Fundamentalist might simply announce, "That's how God made the baby." Who's to say? But all three explanations hold one point in common: They all agree that we cannot account for what we observe in a baby's eyes without acknowledging the impact of events occurring before the child's birth.

In astrology, the South Node of the Moon refers to events occurring before your birth, helping us to see what was in your eyes ten seconds after you were born... however we imagine it got in there! The Moon's North Node, always opposite the South Node, refers to your evolutionary future. It's a subtle point, but arguably the most important symbol in astrology. The North Node represents an alien state of consciousness and an unaccustomed set of circumstances. If you open your heart and mind to them, you put maximum tension on the deadening hold of the past.

As we consider the Nodes of the Moon in your birthchart, we'll be using the language of reincarnation. Whether that notion fits your own spiritual beliefs is of course your own business. If it doesn't work for you, please translate the ideas into ancestral hereditary terms. After all, it makes little practical difference whether we speak of a certain farmer weeding his beans a thousand years before the Caesars as your great, great, mega-great grandfather... or as you yourself in a previous incarnation. Either way, he's someone who lived way back there in history who sort of is you, sort of isn't, and lives on inside you--influencing but not ultimately defining you.

At your birth, the South Node of the Moon lay in Scorpio, the sign of the Detective. Anyone looking into your eyes as you took your first breath would have observed the results of lifetimes spent learning the ways of mystery: an instinctive capacity to recognize lies agreed upon and truths denied. You've grown wise and penetrating, tempered by the stress of countless encounters with what has historically been called evil. But while such experiences breed depth, they do not breed peace. There is a heaviness in your spirit, the price of your wisdom. Now you must learn a new lesson: the peace of simplicity.

That nascent ability to know peace is symbolized by your North Node of the Moon, which lies in Taurus -- the sign of the Earth Spirit. As we saw earlier, the North Node can be seen as the most significant point in the entire birthchart. Why? Because it represents your evolutionary future... the ultimate reason you're alive, in other words. How can you accomplish this Taurean spiritual work? The "yoga" is easy to say, harder to do: you must overcome your dramatic, penetrating instincts, renounce some of your intensity, and consciously seek simplicity. That is, you need to intentionally place yourself in situations which soothe you: stable relationships, contact with physical materials, closeness to plants and animals, and perhaps an immersion in music.

There's another piece to the puzzle: The Moon's South Node falls in the Seventh House of your chart. This implies that previous to this lifetime you learned a lot about compromise and adjustment through devotion to your soulmates. Trouble is, you sometimes gave up too much of yourself to accomplish that, sacrificing truth on the altar of harmony.

In this lifetime, with your North Node of the Moon in the First House, you must act to counterbalance those old devotional tendencies... not so much because they're "bad" as because you've already learned everything you can from them. The time has come for you to wield more authority over the shape of your own experiences, learning a kind of "enlightened selfishness" in which nothing is allowed to stand between you and the kind of life your soul hungers to live.

 

And that's your birth chart.

Trust it; the symbols are Spirit's message to you. In the course of a lifetime, you'll make a billion choices. Any one of them could potentially hurt you terribly, sending you down a barren road. How can you steer a true course? The answer is so profound that it circles around and sounds trivial: listen to your heart, be true to your soul. Noble words and accurate ones, but tough to follow.

The Universe, in its primal intelligence, seems to understand that difficulty. It supplies us with many external supports: Inspiring religions and philosophies. Dear friends who hold the mirror of truth before us. Omens of a thousand kinds. And, above all, the sky itself, which weaves its cryptic message above each newborn infant.

In these pages, you've experienced one reading of that celestial message as it pertains to you. There are others. You may want to consider sitting with a real astrologer ... micro-chips are fine, but a human heart can still express nuances of meaning that no computer can grasp. You may want to order other reports, ones that illuminate your current astrological "weather," or that analyze important relationships. Best of all, you may choose to learn this ancient language yourself, and begin unraveling your own message in your own words.

Whatever your course, we thank you for your time and attention, and wish you grace for your journey.