Stairway to Heaven

This Sunday at 7:50pm local time (12:50am Monday British Summer Time) Venus will enter Virgo for just long enough to reverse course Saturday July 25 and head back into Leo.  He, Venus, will look like a lover returning to his great muse Jupiter for one last long drink of pleasure before entering school Oct 9.  The funny thing is the greater benific will enter school Aug 12, less than 2 weeks after Venus comes back for their second meeting.

These are the kinds of movements that would have generated some really good stories back in the days when people talked about the planets like they were revered founding members of our living family.  Plato walked a line, honoring the stories but trying to bring the public closer to the spherical geometry of Earth turning on its tilted axis that informed them.  He was the last writer I know of who described celestial motions with the reverence of a poetic scientist as opposed to Delphic mystics or engineers promising results of a certain nature.

That’s a little secret about the history of astrology and philosophy.  It’s not a secret because anyone tried to hide it, it’s just that few people who practice astrology read Plato and few people who read Plato are familiar with the language that was taught in all academies back in his day.  That to me is a form of social-schizophrenia.   We see this phenomenon take many forms throughout the ages.  I see it every day in the struggle among my Mexican friends for immigration rights.  They come to see the American government as their oppressor, forgetting the wrongs done to them by the country they fled.  It is natural for humans to think this way.  I suspect we tend to fight the battle that is closest to us at the moment and ignore other complicating factors which might weaken our sense of conviction about the drastic actions we feel forced to take.

Now I will share a little secret about my personal past.  It used to really bother me that I had Venus and Mars in Pisces.  I wasn’t too crazy about having my Sun in a sign passively ruled by Venus (Taurus) either.  I wanted to think of myself as a strong, masculine woman of action.  For a few years I was attached to the idea of being a macho slut.  Being around lesbians and strong older women for many years helped me understand the nuances of what it means to be a strong woman.  The change did not happen overnight or in one victorious moment as I wished it would, knowing better, but still, always hoping for that miraculous transformation.

That burning desire for transformation is natural too, especially in Pisces, because the next place we see anything in this solar system after Pisces is Aries.  Without knowing anything about celestial mechanics, most people know Aries is explosive as a rutting ram.  Aries is a prolonged developmental passage for most humans born when Venus, Mars or Sun was in Pisces.  In the case of the Sun in Pisces, every Piscean Sun can count on 30 years of Arian development, like the unwinding spring of a clock.  It’s just part of the Piscean package.

We are not just an incarnation of our first moment, but of our first cycles.  We take our first breath in motion.  It is a bit confusing for beginners to see experienced astrologers talking about progressions after being trained with a moment frozen in time.  I imagine it is like seeing an engine come to life after taking it apart and putting it back together without ever witnessing what happens when volatile gas enters the cylinders and a hidden spark is set to it.  Without progressions a human life is seen as something static, buffeted by the moments encountered throughout life’s journey.

There must be others, but Dane Rudyer and Plato are the only two I can think of who always discuss the signs as steps in repeating, yet with each repetition, varying cycles.  Though recipes for predictions have been handed down based on these cycles, the philosophy of why we follow them has been buried.  Most astrologers have passed it over in the race to satisfy the public’s craving to outwit nature.  They have to compete after all with engineers who can bring down or raise whole nations with ingenious devices.

K   E   D    K   E   D   K   E   D   K   E   D   K   E   D   K

Last night I celebrated Mars opposing Pluto by taking down and throwing away all the charts on my walls.  I began in the kitchen with the charts for the end of WWII and establishment of Israel, the one for the beginning of the Berlin Airlift; I took down the ones for St. John of the Cross and the establishment of a monastery devoted to poverty and charity, scandalous at the time, resulting in persecution that ruined his health; the charts for the early Huguenot battles, the day of the Greensboro lunch counter sit-in, the first operatic performance of Orpheus and the one for Faye Weldon.  I took down the charts for the early campaign to get pedestrians off the streets and make way for cars in the 1920’s, the annual mass rallies of Nazi’s in post WWI Germany, the chart for Italy invading and occupying Ethiopia.  Bored yet?  Maybe that’s why I took them all down.

I took the ones in the hallway down of the Pope being named and presenting himself to the public, Lincoln, Carl Jung, Thoreau going to jail for not paying taxes in protest of government sanctioned slavery…

To be honest, there were a lot of bitter thoughts going through my mind.  It felt liberating to let the burden go, but the bitterness was there that so few people seemed to care.  Then I moved into my bedroom, stripped the walls completely of all the charts and notes I taped up over the last few years to have these ideas where I could readily see them.  Charts, quotes, alphabets in Greek and Hebrew.   Then I went through my files and threw away all but maybe 15 of the hundreds of charts I’ve saved from over 30 years of studying charts of friends and customers.  I filled more than 10 bags with charts from walls and files.

To a non astrologer this is just one of those moments, but to me it is a manifestation of the power of Mars.  I had to keep releasing the bitter thoughts- aside from that, the action felt good, though rash because it was completely unanticipated.  It had never occurred to me to throw away all that had been so important to me.

But among the bitter thoughts there was an affirmation from the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali that any spiritual path is just a ladder to liberation.  Once we get to heaven we kick the ladder away because we no longer need it.  In Jack and the Beanstalk the impoverished farmer steals the magic goose, returns to Earth and chops down the stalk.  

I’m getting threatening letters from the IRS and will have to clean a few extra houses to appease them.  I have credit card debt that I cannot pay with my current income.  As I removed all those white pages from the dark paneling in my bedroom I surfed back through the years of study with a feeling of having found the magic goose against all odds.  It was almost a stumbling, or at least it felt that way.  I sifted through mountains of other peoples’ knowledge before the mystery that had driven me forward finally took hold of me and gave me a smile from across the centuries like any archeologist dreams of.

Now I can go back to cleaning houses.  It is what my community wants from me.  It is what my community is willing to pay me to do.  While it may sting, it doesn’t matter if just a few people care for just a few minutes about what I have learned.  As one friend said of her husband’s loss of memory, “he has a very limited attention span.”  The same can be said of people struggling against all odds to survive or improve the lives of others.  It doesn’t matter that I cannot make my message more entertaining or hold the attention of my community.  I have received a quieter gift, that for now fills me with enough hope to carry on with the existence I have been given.  The golden eggs of knowledge about what the constellation myths actually refer to are my inner peace.  There is no need to bring the goose down to Earth.  The giant roars and says frightening things, but I don’t believe he will eat me. 

Mars and Free Will

If we really believe we are all one, then Free Will becomes a very complicated concept that cannot be understood independently of other complicated concepts.

As Mars reaches the 7^th stage of partnership with Pluto, following the 6^th of apprenticeship, I am thinking about Free Will.

Free Will makes me think of a story my son told me about his job as a mechanic.  He was sitting around with a work mate one day, shooting the breeze while the boss was out of town.  There was no pressure to generate billable hours, and neither of them was on fire to complete a project on one of their own cars.  They really didn’t have to be at work, they just liked being in the shop while the boss was out of town.  The slightly older but very experienced mechanic with a deep affection for cars, especially old ones, said, “I’ve got an idea!  Let’s get a bicycle tube.”  They located an old tube lying around the shop.  They don’t just work on cars there; the boss is a very creative guy and encourages the few workers to bring in any project that requires welding or shop tools.  He likes to tell people that they are more than just a mechanic shop, and this is evident by the works in progress sitting in the parking lot and work bays.  One example is a hand built bike standing near the front bay that was built by a third worker, also out of town the day this little adventure took place.  The contraption is spray painted silver and does not appear to be ride able, but my son assures me they have ridden it to the railroad tracks. 

Well they cut the tube and clamped it on the tail pipe of the slightly older mechanic’s old Saab.  My son describes it as looking like a professor’s car.  What is that?  Modest but respectable?  Any way I don’t remember if they tied the dangling end of the tube to make it harder for exhaust to escape or not.  I’m sure some folks reading this will be familiar with the gag.  They were ready to go to lunch!  When they stopped at a light in front of the local patio café, the new hip place up the hill from the railroad tracks, they gave the idling engine a bit of extra gas to let that tube waving from the tail pipe do its thing.

I enjoy a hearty laugh when my son tells these stories.  Then, like a good wet blanket, I say, “couldn’t you get in trouble with the cops for that?”  But I am imagining that tube flailing around and the sound it must make.  My son gave a hilarious rendition of the fluttering putt putts, but I don’t trust him.  When he mimics people he uses the same voice for all women and can be sloppy with his accents.

That to me is free will.  No, I’m not thinking of the mechanics’ public display for amusement, but the sputtering tube waving from the tail pipe.  When we get puffed up about something and feel it must be done and we do it by God we do it!  We are exercising free will, just like that tube connected to the exhaust pipe.  As long as we pretend we are not connected to each other, to the planets in heaven, as long as we pretend that we are individuals in control of our own lives we can say we are exercising our very own personal free will, or that a person we’re observing is exercising theirs.

We can even look at someone whose tail pipe is not idling very high and wonder why they don’t use their will.  “Use the will GOD gave you!”  Like the characters in Tolstoy novels that beat their horses in a rush to abduct some sweet young, red cheeked girl they just have to have from the latest formal ball.  The gambler beats the horses and flies to meet his buddies and the horses exercise their will and I probably am rewriting Tolstoy but this is not about him.  Or maybe it is.  Free Will. 

Free will is blind.  It is nothing but a bicycle tube stiff with exhaust trying to escape from a tail pipe.  Self control, imagination, memory, intellectual processing of perceptions are different words.  If we really believe the universe is one and we’re not just parroting words that we’ve heard repeated in uplifting songs sung among people that agree with us (or at least pretend to) while we are in church on Sunday or practicing meditation on Wednesday, if we really believe we are in fact and deed all one, then free will becomes a very complicated concept that cannot be understood independently of other equally complicated concepts.

We follow the planets that were here since like forever (you know, like a California TV character with her gum smacking and her painted toenails would say it, “Like-for Evverr.”)  We have had electric light for like not forever.  We have had controlled fire for like not forever.  But we have had the Moon and Mars for like 4 evverrs.……. 

 

When I think of blind will I am reminded of the medical hero who said “geez this opium is really addictive, let’s just inject it directly into the veins so it can kill the pain at the source.”  Not.  Or the following generation of scientists who said if we can just isolate the parts of the molecule that kill the pain maybe it won’t be so addictive.  So now people crave pills instead of laudanum in an elixir or opium smoked from a pipe.

A careful astrologer follows Mars to understand will, with no pretensions to mastering anything.  She only hopes to see how the story of Free Will looks, when blindly played out in our individual lives against the unfolding heaven that surrounds us.  And though an astrologer may focus for moments or days at a time on Mars and its relationship to her and her Earthly comrades, she always has the other planets in the back of her mind; Venus and Kindness, Saturn and Self Discipline, Mercury and Perception, Jupiter and Imagination. 

Our bodies are like bicycle tubes attached to invisible exhaust pipes.  Some people get tubes shaped like a peace symbol and the air goes round and round in circles escaping through a bunch of tiny outlets and we see a nice rhythmic pulsing of peaceful smiles.  Some people get other kinds of bodies.  The tubes might be formulated with a different combination of chemicals, resulting in funky forms that stretch or pop, or blow up into frightening shapes.  If we really believe the unity myth, like one god, and all humans created in that one god’s likeness, then there must be some function for each one of those tubes wagging from the air of some invisible exhaust pipe.  And what about the invisible engine expelling air through the invisible pipe?  In other words where is Mars when each person starts breathing in that universal exhaust?  The goal of astrology is to sort that out according to where and when we take our first breaths. 

In order to know whether there is a connection between what’s happening with our will and the lesser malefic known as Mars we have to actually follow Mars….  In that way we live with knowledge of what is happening in the sky that holds us, or as Plato said (transliterated from the Greek letters) Con Sciencia. 

 

To live consciously in this sense means knowing where Mars was when we were born and where it was when we lost it or when we couldn’t stand a situation anymore and took action to change it; where it was when an event came up in our life that forced us to take action that we really wanted to avoid. To gain a universal understanding of will we study Mars, among the other planets, in the map of heaven for the moment of birth and in maps for moments of crisis.  Each person decides for herself if she can perceive a connection between Mars and the uncontrollable urge, subtle or crude as it may be, to make something happen.

                                            

Mars enters Pluto's 7th House Wednesday July 15

This Wednesday Mars will be half way around the zodiac from Pluto, or opposing it.    They met November 10, 2014.  You can see Mars below in Pluto's 1st House.

Every day that Mars was in Pluto's 1st house (Nov 10-Dec 21,2014) they rose together.  Now they are facing off on opposite sides of Earth.  The 7^th house is called the House of Partnership and Hidden Enemies.  

While one is setting, the other is rising.  Like a couple on either side of a see saw.

This is a post about Mars meeting Pluto this past November.  

Here is a link to a page about Houses.