Invisibility vs. transparency

Emerging from my recent musings about invisibility, it occurred to me that there is an important distinction between invisibility and transparency. While the invisible object cannot be seen, the transparent object can be clearly discerned, even as it is looked through. Glass is transparent, as is water. Air is invisible. You can walk through one, but not the other, not without noticing anyway.

Sheldon Kopp, psychotherapist and author of that strange and profound book, If You Meet Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! (see also), writes that the best way for a therapist to help a patient is not to tell the patient how to be but for the therapist to learn to be transparent, to the patient and to himself, in order for the relation to do its transformative work:

Relocation charts

I’d always been vaguely aware of astrocartography but never thought about it much even though I now live something like 6,000 miles away from where I was born, until Neith suggested I should do a relocation chart for myself. The results were fascinating.

A relocation chart basically casts your natal chart for the place of your choice. It could be somewhere you’re at right now, or hope to be in the future. While your natal chart is still your ‘main’ chart, the main map of your psyche, the relocated chart can bring up some themes that may arise for you when you move to a different location. Because the chart is cast for the time and date you’re born, the planetary configurations remain exactly the same in aspect as your natal chart. However, the change of location may alter the axes, that is, the house positions. The further you move from your place of birth, the more radical the shift in axes. But even a relatively small change in location may shift your house axes a few degrees, and that is sometimes enough to shift planets into different houses, or angles into different signs.

Hades Moon II: The darkness that is mine

Parts I and III.

Judy Hall’s book spooked me (in a good way) because nearly everything she described about the Hades Moon I recognised from my own life. Now, I like working with astrology, but there are times when the general descriptions in astrology ‘cookbooks’ don’t necessarily apply, and thus require creative interpretation. Because Hall’s book focuses on individuals with the Pluto-Moon aspects, and thus their specific life circumstances, description and implication of the aspect become that much more personal and vivid. The Hades Moon is not about behaviour or circumstance but about psychic experience so deep there are few words to describe it.

Until I read Eric Francis’ delineation of the Capricorn Moon, I could never really identify with textbook descriptions of the Cap moon as ambitious, money-grabbing, and so on. It is likely that many with Cap moons come across that way because they channel their repressed emotions into tangible achievements, as if to say ‘If my material circumstances are okay, I’m okay’. The impact of Pluto aspecting this fragile but tough moon never really crossed my mind until, in consultation with Eric Francis himself one day, he said, ‘Pluto aspecting your moon gives me the sense of hanging onto a cliff by your fingertips’. He meant having both planets at their anaretic degrees, or the last degrees of the signs. My Pluto at 29+° Virgo was in exact trine to my moon at 29+° Capricorn.

Pluto transits: Transform, or die

The effect of Pluto is like a stone-grinder, and as its movement through the zodiac is glacially slow, taking 246 years to pass through all 12 signs, its impact on the psyche is to transform it inside out. When it makes exact contact with sensitive points in an individual’s chart, its intensity (if not its effect) can only be described as atomic, or a call to ‘transform, or die’.

Adventures of the Invisible Girl III

I want to thank everyone on the Sasstrology.net forum who helped me ponder my apparent invisibility.

I am currently re-reading Joy Michaud’s The Uranus-Neptune Influence (1994). She writes that the way to best channel Neptune’s idealism and ethereality is through Saturn, not so much in terms of fencing in, or limiting, Neptune’s expression, but in the sense of giving it concrete structure (51):

Adventures of the Invisible Girl

While I’m still mulling over issues of projection, I thought I would try and make some sense of my apparent invisibility. I mentioned this once to Mercury in Virgo (MV, from now), that I often felt like I was an understudy for a role I didn’t ask to play. He retorted by saying that I wasn’t so much treated as an understudy as audition for it.

I’m still trying to make sense of that comment, for as far as I am able to assess my behaviour, I’m pretty assertive. I make my views heard, send emails, offer opinions and such, but apparently my presence is either undetected or filtered through a fog. Is it because Neptune (illusion) opposes my Sun (presence)? Who knows? The question is, what to do about it.