Before Venus, and after

Toilette der Venus, Peter Paul Rubens, 1612–15

So what was the Venus occultation, otherwise known as the transit of Venus across the Sun, like for everyone? (about this transit, see astrobarry, Lynn Hayes, and Eric Francis)

All this activity in Gemini — eclipses, Venus, Jupiter — is activating my Gemini stellium and descendant (not to mention all that activity in Virgo and Pisces, too), but not yet in ways that I can fully grasp. There is a palpable sense of a ‘before’ and ‘after’ though. A sense that old ways of doing and thinking are rapidly becoming outdated. I’m not yet sure what form the ‘new’ ways might take, but I’m pretty sure the old ways won’t work anymore.

All I seem to be able to do right now is just be ready. Be ready to run, glide, flow, when the call comes (Jupiter?).

It’s all a bit scary, and a bit exciting too. What a summer this promises to be.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons.

Eclipse in the first house: And the scabs fall off…

I like this picture of a replica of Donatello’s David (1430) (front view here) with the paint peeling off his butt like a scab. After the partial lunar eclipse in my first house (conj Jupiter opp Venus) this past weekend, it feels like the ones on my metaphorical behind are falling off too.

I can’t really explain what’s happened — nothing ‘big’ has occurred (so far). It is more like a sense that something’s shifted, and that while the movement was minimal the effects are multiplied. It’s a bit like that arcade game where you drop in coins one by one trying to move the coins in the moving drawer bit by bit. The process seems to take forever and then suddenly you drop in a coin at the right moment and a whole bunch (and maybe a prize or two) falls into the tray.

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.

Pluto transits: Fingering the yod

Julie Demboski posted a fascinating entry about Pluto currently being at the apex of a yod, with the South Node and (retrograding!) Mercury in sextile at the base.

Since I have a yod in my chart which I’m still trying to figure out, I posted this in the comment stream (including Julie’s reply ):

Thanks for this, Julie. Yikes, Pluto is exactly opposite my Venus in the 7th house. Major transformations on the horizon, I can feel it, to do with establishing my own values, in the context of the values of (workplace, institutional) power, which, these days, are all expressed through money or anxiety about money.

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’.

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.

Now you see me, now you don’t

One of the reasons I really like Elsa P’s blog is that she relates aspects in the natal chart very directly and pithily to human behaviour. She writes quite a bit on Neptune aspects which I find fascinating and illuminating. Neptune is in my 12th house and often I find that I can’t quite get a grasp on it, much less try and direct the energy in a way that is useful.

Recently, Elsa blogged about ‘People who forget how much they like you … Venus Neptune the most likely culprit’, and I nearly jumped out of my chair. She puts it down to Neptune’s effect (dissolving, hallucinatory) on Venus (likeability and value). Here’s part of the post:

Here is another weird thing that happens in and around me with that Neptune action. It is very easy for people to forget they like me. They also can forget they don’t like me, I’ll get to that next. But on this other, there are people who like me, maybe even like me a lot, maybe they even love me but they lose track of this somehow and treat me like crap!

This leads to separation of course at which point with a little time, say an hour or a year depending, they think back and say, ya know. I really liked that Elsa after all. I actually regret slitting her throat, what was I thinking?

At that point they come back in my life and I am understandably cagey. Will their brain leave them again? Probably.

Waking up your Venus

An astrologer friend casting a brief eye on my chart recently left me with this piece of advice:

‘You need to wake up your Venus.’

Venus in my chart is one I rarely think about, being far more obsessed about Sun-Mercury-Saturn in the sixth house; i.e. the doing aspects of my chart. As a novice astrologer, however, I am also aware that we also have to be our charts. Sometimes, the natal chart is mistakenly treated as a chart of limitations — this is who you are — a set of characteristics written in stone. I much prefer to think of the chart as who one can become — that is, the task of the subject in this life is to manifest the chart’s potential.

Sex and Zen I: Vesta

As Venus (pleasure) moves into a watery trine (emotion) with Mars (libido), sex seems to be on everyone’s mind. Eric Francis of Planet Waves rants about the hypocrisy surrounding the supposed sexual misconduct of Eliot Spitzer, the governor of New York. Jundo Cohen of Treeleaf has made it the subject of his talks for the next few days, which he rather poetically refers to as ‘finding stillness in motion’! Rev. Kusala Bhikshu, who runs the Urban Dharma website, has just sent out his latest newsletter on the subject of celibacy. Celibacy, however, is only mandatory for monastics. Lay practitioners are still free to shag as much as they want, within the bounds of reason, moderation and awareness.

Pluto and the ‘alchemy of desire’

I recently stumbled upon this article by Elizabeth Spring called ‘What’s Pluto Got to Do With It? The Alchemy of Desire’. I like it for its clarity and personal nature, and yet that it does not over-simplify the experience of a Pluto transit which tends to impact individuals in complex ways. And even if one is unfamiliar with astrology, Spring’s observations are insightful in themselves.