Saturn transiting the 10th house: Meet the parents

I wondered what the New Moon in Scorpio (in my 12th house) would throw up from my unconscious (Neith shares an amazingly frank experience on her blog). With Saturn in my 10th, Uranus in my 4th and Pluto in my 1st, I have been busy looking out for career, home and self issues, but forgot (or repressed) the fact that the 4th and 10th houses also deal with the influence of one’s parents (see this very interesting chart).

Projection: Channelling by proxy

More thoughts on being projected on. (Note: I am aware that this doesn’t absolve me from my own projections, but that’s not the subject of today’s topic).

I was musing the last time about MV reading deception into what, to me, are neutral requests or statements. There is no better time than while Mercury is retrograde in Gemini to try and review this process.

Projection: Who I’m not

In a moment of synchronicity, I read Julie Demboski’s take on ‘Receiving Venus’ very shortly after having one of my impossible conversations with the Mercury in Virgo person (hereafter known as ‘MV’) in my life, though I didn’t allow it to escalate this time.

His Venus falls in my 7th house (as does mine, so the propensity for double projection is definitely there) and here’s what Demboski writes of receiving someone else’s Venus in one’s 7th house, the house of partnerships and projection:

Someone else’s Venus falling in your 7th House gives an interesting effect: there is a kind of projection, where you are drawn to the Venus person, and they to you, and it becomes difficult to tell who is the ‘instigator’ of the energy. Because of this ‘is it you, or is it me?’ exchange, the relationship can devolve into a mutual admiration society that eventually just fizzles away. You’d think it would create a strong attraction, a bond of love and natural assumption that this could be the mate, and sometimes it does, usually when everyone’s owning their own energies and projection and dissociation aren’t issues.

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.

You ‘are’ who I project, but who am I?

The more I read about Venus retrograde and self-reassessment, the more my unconscious behaviour is starting to surface, and I’m using this blog, as ever, as a means of keeping it in the light.

As I summed up in a previous post, Venus retrograding in the self-centred sign of Aries is forcing us to come to terms with who that self is for each of us, or as Eric Francis put it, how to have a ‘relationship with ourselves’. Boots Hart’s article on the retrograde addresses how the self will need to engage, not just who it is or what it wants, but, crucially, what it also projects onto others:

Venus retrograde: Reassessing what you value

These are tense times. Scanning the headlines on the Huffington Post makes me dizzy, anxious, and mildly depressed. Trying to fix the world is important, but perhaps the only way to do that is to look within and fix ourselves, if ‘fix’ is even the right word.

Emotional vampires

A search for a cookbook (I was looking for Nigel Slater’s Real Fast Puddings!) turned up something else completely. I picked up a book I bought years ago when I was in the midst of being drained. That book is Albert Bernstein’s Emotional Vampires, which offers advice on how to deal with people who drain you dry.

I don’t usually like self-help books but this one is an exception because it doesn’t assume something is wrong with the reader! Instead it offers practical advice on how to deal with the emotional vampires we may have to face at home, at work, and elsewhere in our daily lives. It’s not a ‘why’ book (as in, ‘Why do these people do what they do?’); indeed, Bernstein argues that sympathising with their plights, crises, childhood traumas, do not teach us how to deal with their behaviour. It is a ‘how do I deal with what’s here’ book, breaking down the most common types into five categories, each with further sub-categories. Bernstein has a website that posts the checklists and basic characterisation. They’re quite funny and worth a look — you’re bound to find someone you recognise in there.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall…

I finally bought a mirror yesterday after three months of moving into my new flat. I remarked to a friend that living without a mirror has been a good exercise in ego reflection, and although I’d meant it as a joke, it made me think about mirrors, and ego reflections.

Mirrors are funny things, both as functional objects, and metaphors. Do they let us see ourselves as we are? Or do they let us see through to another reality through which a version of ourselves exist? In our age of precision engineering, we presume that mirrors reflect perfectly the object being reflected. However, the idea of perfect reflections is a fairly recent one. Ancient mirrors were made of polished metal. Their more modern incarnations of glass coated with a thin sheet of reflective metal originated in Venice in the 16th century, though other sources indicate that it may have originated in Roman times. And even so, image distortions were not unexpected.

Sitting with desire I

The cause of suffering, it is often cited of Buddhism, is desire, attachment or craving. We suffer because we crave what we (think we) don’t have. And we crave any number of things, both tangible and ephemeral — ice cream, a bigger house, a bigger car, someone to love us, we may even crave a more fulfilling spiritual life.

Projecting the shadow self

Reading over the last two posts again, I realise I haven’t been entirely honest. Repression is too easy, and in writing about the seventh house of partnerships, I fell into precisely what one does through the seventh house — project onto the other aspects of the self one’d prefer to externalise (it is my chart, after all).

Encountering the shoulds — navigating Pluto in Capricorn

Carrying on the Saturn/Capricorn theme, I read something on evolutionary astrologer Tom Jacobs’ blog that resonates with my last post. Much has been and will be written about Pluto’s impending ingress into Capricorn later this month (google it). Plutonian energy is transformative, but works at a ‘cellular’ rather than a surface level, and many expect its transit through Capricorn to irrevocably change the way governments, corporations and traditional authority and institutions work. As Pluto is also about power, much of this change is likely to involve a massive resistance by these institutions to cling on to their power. The transit will last for about 17 years and it will be quite a ride.