Astrology of 10/4 – 10/10: Refining the Raison d’être

Raison d’être – “the most important reason or purpose for someone or something’s existence.” When Venus and Mars contact one another in conjunction, they fuse archetype. How would our values (Venus) motivate and compel us (Mars)? This examination may occur both in celebration and under duress. Life is dramatic right now and, not surprisingly, so are the planets. With the Jupiter-Uranus opposition still in orb, Venus and Mars join up in conjunction the same day that the Sun and Moon in their signs of rulership (Libra and Aries) oppose one another and form a Full Moon. Additionally, Pluto in Capricorn squares the Full Moon axis. Jupiter is completing its transit through Libra and enters Scorpio at the end of the week. This kind of astrology is very dynamic. As I mentioned in the Jupiter-Uranus webinar (recording still available here), a breakthrough in of itself is ecstatic and electrifying. But the shadow of the breakthrough is that there is something to break through. What is life itself telling us right now? It may speak to us of pathways which no longer yield any fruit: that force is not an answer either. If we are creatures driven by value (and think about it), there is a way in which our actual deepest values – maybe the ones we’ve put aside or made too precious to be part of daily life – are the signposts that illuminate the path.

A woman I met at a gathering once comes to mind – the moment she said she was inquiring about what was “beneath the beneath the beneath”. As a Plutonian, I’m into what she’s talking about. Same goes for our raison d’être and its roots – deep below its manifestations on the surface which are all emanations of the root. Continually, I think this to be a gem or a great magnet inside of each being, each holding a key for the thrival of this planet, beyond industrialism, beyond artificiality, beyond outdated social conditioning.

(Top image: Tatiana Plakhova)

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October 5

Venus in 19 Virgo conjunct Mars in 19 Virgo: 9:53 AM PDT

When Venus and Mars are conjunct, the two archetypes infuse one another. Love (Venus) can be activated more than usual by the will that Mars represents, or we may find our impulses or will to be motivated by more refined interests. Here are some things to pay attention to as they join up in Virgo:

• Apologizing as a love language – that sincere apologies soften our relationships and open up an opportunity to clear resentment as well as to show our partners/friends/etc. that we actually care how we affect them. To be gracious at this time in both giving and receiving apology where it is inspired.
• The love language that is adjusting to another person in actual practice – thoroughly taking in another’s reality and preferences, remembering them, and acting upon them. The way that we feel loved when people remember what we verbalize, or people fine-tune and specify how they interact with us according to information we have volunteered about ourselves.
• The nobility that comes with maintaining the practice of being compassionate with others and their sensitivities that they have shared with us or that we have picked up on. These locations of intimacy are a place where people are open to being hurt as well. So when we honor and protect these spaces, rather than exploit them, we are engaging the noble side of Mars in our relationships.
• The desire, drive, and esteem we may take in self-improvement or self-improvement of a relationship.
• The line between connoisseurship and elegant discernment of taste versus criticism that is unconsciously motivated. The possibility that our acts of critique can be coming from a loving space (such as to foster craft), as much as critique can be aggressive, or acts of vanity.
• The relationship energy we might find between a coach and the person being coached – acts of love meant to develop the craft/greatness of the other. The complexities of these kinds of relationships and the element of consent within self-improvement constructs (i.e. confrontation of another’s faults, intervention of said faults, unsolicited advice, desired advice, etc.). How do we value and balance our impulses to “improve” others? How receptive and discerning are we to the advice of others? When does our sense of propriety get in the way of confrontations that are needed to be had – versus when is criticism ruthless?
• Is that which we are improving inherently ‘bad’ at the core or are we lifting something inherently elegant out, like a sculptor with a slab of marble?

Full Moon in 12 Aries: 11:40 AM PDT

Mercury is close behind the Sun in Libra, to catch up later in the week. Pluto in Capricorn squares this Moon and the Sun – the Sun-Pluto square also to go exact later in the week. These are some emergent themes:

• Becoming more aware of our will to love; our raison d’être, and what we will defend/protect/champion out of love.
• The way that if we are too overly accommodating, or always energetically adjusting to others, we may begin to feel a disparity in our private self or interior life, and begin to feel very lonely.
• The ripening of impulse or a drive to become something, as nurtured by the warmth of companionship/relationship.
• Feeling a tension of emergent impulses which are not proper/polite or do not seem to already be in balance with the environment. Likewise, an emergent impulse which is coming from the ocean of the whole and thereby relates to the whole: a sense that one’s individuality has some deeper place in the entirety. Because the stressful aspects (opposition and square) in this alignment, the individuation process that we undergo may be motivated by tensions at this time, or we may find a lot of friction in our inner lives (same as we watch it in the outer world). So emblematic of Aries is the Andrea Gibson line:

“I said to the sun, ‘Tell me about the big bang.’ The sun said, ‘it hurts to become.”

October 8

Venus in 22 Virgo square Saturn in 22 Sagittarius: 5:54 AM PDT

• The value that we may place, or directly experience, in engaging with a practice or ritual.
• The pressure and anxiety, weariness, desolateness, we feel when we place matters that are in interaction with the greater cosmos in our own compartmentalized world of responsibility and control. The relief, grace, miracles – that occur when we extend our efforts and practices in dialogue with a greater whole who can help lift us up.
• The practical, embodied prayer that is tending to life – that which we do to take care of ourselves, our projects, our dreams, are the physical bridge that the numinous/beyond meets us.
• If we are feeling overwhelmed and bogged down/oppressed by daily life, it may point to an adjustment in the bigger picture or the “mission statement” informing our lives. We may also need/find adjustments in our practices which allow us to use limited energy more efficiently, or to even generate new energy (life hacks).

Sun in 15 Libra conjunct Mercury in 15 Libra: 1:54 PM PDT

Sun-Mercury conjunctions combine the archetypes of the Sun and Mercury in all of its multidimensionality! The feeling that usually comes to mind for me is the sense of a very bright, beaming, message. Whether this message meets us like a beautiful symphony that transports us to a feeling of intimacy with the Universe itself, or like a rude awakening or the Sun’s light that one can only squint and hide in the face of…. that will simply depend. Some thoughts:

• The potential to be overwhelmed by something beautiful, to feel elevated by basking in its rays.
• An illumination of the small pieces, steps, or mechanics of something, where before that information could not accessed so clearly. Creation that is well-crafted appears magical or has an aura of greatness in some way, though with eye for what built it, it might become more digestible in the sense that it can be recreated, aspired to, internalized.
• The quality (echoing Mars and Venus together in Virgo), that our language can uplift and warm and radiate, as much as it can scorch and burn. We can use our ideas to infuse light and inspiration into our lives and relationships.

October 9

Mercury in 16 Libra square Pluto in 16 Capricorn: 5:24 AM PDT, & Sun in 16 Libra square Pluto in 16 Capricorn: 5:07 PM PDT

“How can cultural workers respond to climate change?… Climate change exceeds what the form of the bourgeois novel can express. As Ghosh acknowledges, it isn’t working in this “time when the wild has become the norm.” Perhaps realizing its limitations, Arundhati Roy, for example, preferred to write in nonfiction about what Rob Nixon has so aptly called the slow violence of a developmentalism that imposes itself on a nature it cannot really perceive or value. As Nixon, Roy, Anna Tsing, and others are quick to note, to that developmentalism, local or indigenous people are either invisible or part of that “nature.” Ghosh fears we are now entering into a great derangement, a time when art and literature concealed rather than articulated the nature of the times and the time of nature. His inexplicable attachment to the bourgeois novel as form at least makes him an acute observer of how this derangement works through its formal limitations.” – On the Obsolescence of the Bourgeois Novel in the Anthropocene by McKenzie Wark

• When the time comes that proper/polite ways of being and thinking only uphold something that is necessarily dying (the parts of culture that are broken). The creative tension of coming up with new standards of aesthetic, beauty, language, value, etc. when the old order is dying.
• The way that new values can be generated when we have an ideal as a focusing agent for consciousness. So rather than only to combat the problem or dying issue that already exists, we imagine possibility. Then we imagine how we align with that possibility. It is inventiveness in which as-of-yet-to-be-seen possibilities enter our own consciousness or the consciousness of the world, if we are willing to make contact with the unknown.

October 10

Jupiter enters Scorpio: 6:20 AM PDT

(Image: Andrew Archer)

Jupiter will remain in Scorpio until November 8, 2018.

• Our involvement and care for the natural world deepens as our actual intimacy and merging with it, deepens. While we currently have the option to be very separate from nature and encased in the human-made world, Jupiter in Scorpio speaks to the expansive possibilities of the actual merging with nature. There are two distinct fronts of merging with nature: inner and outer. The inner layer of merging with nature is to actually listen to, invest, and move toward what is most primordial about us – what turns us on. The out layer of merging with nature would have to do with ritual, plant medicine, outdoor forms of education, becoming involved with animal totems, etc. While we are conditioned to think the world of nature outside of humanity is inert or unknowable, humanity may find itself altered by letting nature in and being in energetic communion with it.
• Higher learning through energy exchange.
• This would be a great transit to begin to investigate the philosophy of Ecosexuality. This way of thinking moves from locating Earth as mother to Earth as lover.

“As Jung famously said of Eros, ‘Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking.

The ecosexual seeks to move toward reunion with all the lost and alienated parts of himself, human or otherwise. Everything inside mirrors something outside; the urge to wholeness, therefore, is enacted through relationship. A relationship in which the core being of each party affects the other, in which there is a melting of certain boundaries of self, is a kind of sexual relationship. The judgmentality I was speaking of [earlier], whose essence is, “I would not do as you did, were I you” – i.e. you and I are fundamentally different, separate – is not erotic. It does not dissolve boundaries, it enforces them.

None of this to imply there is never a time to discriminate, never a time to fight, never a time to enforce boundaries, and never a time to enact what Jung would call the masculine principle of Logos. We are sexual beings, but we are not only sexual beings. In our culture, though, or sexual nature is suppressed, channeled into the margins, or given partial or superficial expression to neuter its revolutionary potential.

It is this revolutionary potential that makes ecosexuality, and indeed all liberated sexuality, a threat to patriarchal, control-based society and to any culture that treats people or nature as mere objects. Authoritarian regimes are nearly unanimous in their restrictive sexual morality. Pure eros cares nothing for hierarchies, propriety, or convention. It obliterates rules, plans, calendars, and clocks, compelling us through the exigency of desire to come to the present moment, to seek union, now. Our society, rather than suppress eros outright, diverts it into inconsequential realms… What if, instead, we used the power of eros to create community where there is now alienation, wholeness where there is now separation, abundance where there is now scarcity? What if we used the power of eros to inspire action where there is now apathy, wisdom where there is now ignorance, service where there is now greed?” – from “The Ecosexual Awakening” by Charles Eisenstein, one essay in the multi-authored collection titled “Ecosexuality: When Nature Inspires the Arts of Love.”

(Image: Frida Kahlo)

Thank you for meditating on the planets with me this week! I know I’m not brief – and it is wonderful that you’ve read through this! Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

The 60 hour Evolutionary Astrology Immersion Course is approaching! Enroll by emailing me at sabrina@monarchastrology.com. Read more here:

 

With love,

Sabrina Monarch

Sabrina Monarch is a soul-centered Evolutionary Astrologer who publishes weekly astrological forecasts. She has been collecting astrological experience for over a decade. She also enjoys kundalini and ashtanga yoga, hiking and creative writing.