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.

Yod in, yod out

In my last post about yods, I mentioned the yod’s effect as being hard to quantify as the energies of the planets are channelled through incompatible elements and modalities. People with yods in their charts tend to find it challenging to integrate these conflicting energies, if, in the first place, they are aware of it. One of the characteristics of natives with yods is that they may not identify with any of the placement of the yod planets at all… Joan Kellog writes in her book, The Yod: Its Esoteric Meaning, that the yod is a karmic configuration, and that in the realm of esoteric astrology, such configurations may remain hidden to the natives until such a time the soul is ready to deal with its energies.

Oh my Yod!

All these years of looking at my chart, as a self-taught, novice astrologer, I can’t believe I failed to notice yod in it! Maybe because I’ve been overly obsessed with Sun-Saturn-Mercury in the 6th house. At any rate, I recently discover that I have a yod, the apex of which points to the sleeping Venus, which I was told to try and wake up… I looked up a few websites and realised that very little attention is paid to the yod, maybe because it is so difficult to describe and analyse.

Bob Marks offers a very decent analysis of the yod, and his article prompted me to get Karen Hamaker-Zondag’s The Yod Book. The result is a flash of amazement on my part — finally, my chart and my life are starting to make sense…