“My dear, accept this dedication: it is given over, as it were blindfolded, but therefore undisturbed by any consideration, in sincerity. Who you are I know not; where you are I know not; what your name is I know not. Yet you are my hope, my joy, my pride, and my unknown honour.” – Kierkegaard from dedication to ‘That Single Individual’
This is dedicated the millions of unique individuals who happen to share a common aspect, they were born when the Sun was in the sign of Cancer. You are unique and you are not the Sun in Cancer, but one who possesses this attribute amongst many other things. This was written for you, solely for you the reader, when you read it I do not know. I may be dead but this was still written for you the person who looked to the sky for meaning in their life and to their life. I will tell you what meanings I know and the symbolism within them to help you if I can on your unique journey, but you will add to some meanings and discard some of these other meanings and this you are right to do. For I possess my truth and my meaning but you must search for your own truth and own meaning. Because you look for the meaning of you, this is not a short trip but a life long journey and we are all on it together.
“But that is not the question. Why are we here that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come.” – Samuel Beckett ‘Godot’
Even then I cannot define my truths, the more we try to define what is truthful to us the less truthful it becomes. Truths always remain a sense of something that rises from the pit of our being, undefined by words but felt profoundly. The more rational they become the less honest they appear for we are not rational beings although we possess rational abilities we are beings that think symbolically, where a star can represent whatever we need it to. We are beings in which scratches in the sand can represent thoughts and ideas, we are beings that can understand the thoughts of others because we can understand scratches in the sand. Before we were making scratches in the sand we were making scratches in the night sky, these scratches contain the oldest stories and ideas of what it is to be human that we have from a long past. We are beings that cannot live without meaning and so we gave meaning to the stars. In giving meaning to the stars we gave meaning to ourselves and the universe. For we are the beings that cannot live in a universe without justice and mercy. So we wait for the true pole star to come the one that will not fall.
To search for meaning is to find what it is that our life revolves around. That point of revolution is the axial tilt and at its northern end lies the pole star. If you have time one night you can watch the sky revolve around that one point. This is the point of Gods, but only if your life revolves around a God or Gods. If it revolves around art then that is what the pole star represents to you. Astrology describes how your life revolves around a point not the point itself. It adds meaning to this search for a purpose bigger than ourselves and for an understanding of it. But know this searcher, all Pole stars fall. They fall towards the celestial equator the place of Uranus. The place where God(Jupiter) is dead. In that place they rise once more from the ashes to return to the pole, reborn. The place where they cross the celestial equator and the Axial tilt is the core of the Earth, depths of despair, hell or Hades. In this place we are compulsed to see our true identity and be our true selves revealed in all their ugliness. To see the beast that is the constant companion of our inner Christ, our inner pole star. To scour that beast within, with the reality (Saturn) of what we are and what we have done under the name of our God on high. When our inner Christ (Jupiter) lies bleeding we will finally kill him. To be the place where God is dead, Uranus. In his death, is the beast’s death. He will rise without the beast, but as he rises a new the beast will return and grow in strength. For he cannot take the pole except the beast be at his strongest. Whatever lies at our pole it always contains the beast at his strongest.
This rise and fall of the pole star or God is imitated by the rise and fall of the sun through the year in the northern hemisphere. At the winter solstice it falls to its lowest point in the sky 23.5 degrees south. The moment of its death and rebirth. At the spring equinox it is returned to the celestial equator a point of balance before growing strong once more, from this point the beast within grows ever stronger. At the summer solstice it rises to its height 23.5 degrees North. Here the beast is God, consumed by its own power and light. It is here the beast falls. When the beast falls it brings down all gods with it. At the autumn equinox the beast is brought low and returns to the celestial equator with God to be scoured by the judgements of hell once more. This cycle is repeated throughout our lives. It rises and falls as much in our generation as any other, but we all as individuals and as generations define our rise and fall in ways unique to us.
“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us then not speak ill of this generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all. It is true the population has increased.” -Samuel Beckett ‘Godot’
So get comfortable because this is a long but hopefully revealing read to start you on your road to your unique self discovery. Because this is the meaning of you my dearest one, it will not contain a MacAstrology burger for 99 cents. You are not fast food but the slow process of self discovery that covers a life time. To help us get started on this journey, I use the words of many that have gone before you and me on that Journey through life. I pick from their truths, ones that resonated with me, so my dear get ready to have some slow one to one time with C S Lewis, Tolstoy, Victor Hugo, Emily Bronte, Kierkegaard, Byron, Pascal, Terry Pratchett and Saint Augustine. Quite a lot of Pratchett actually for it is of no use looking for meaning amongst the greats if we never address our inner dickhead, the beast my dearest one for it feeds upon them. If we do not address our own dickheadedness we will feed it instead of finding some honest meaning to ourselves. We must laugh at our own arrogance and shrink ourselves back down to our oh so human form to understand our place in the long story of humanity. Get ready to step back in time and see the Sumerian view of reality of their Sumerian world and how it shaped their mythology, which gave us the symbols of astrology. How we have built layers and complexity throughout this history of mankind that gives us deep meaning and symbolism in all aspects of our lives.
The sun is at the centre of our solar system it pulls or holds the planets in orbit around it. The sun in astrology is similar it pulls together all the different aspects of our personality or consciousness to make a whole. The sign the sun is in along with the house describe in general how our personality forms and develops throughout life. Each sign and house has its own mythology and this mythology contains meanings that are true for all of humanity. It is not just Sun in Cancer whose first environment is the womb but all of humanity. It is not just Sun in Cancer that has a mother we all do. Sun in Cancer signifies the importance of these things in our consciousness although they are important to all, Sun in cancer may be more conscious of their effects than others. Or more importantly in general it appears to us that they are more conscious of these issues: family, environment, community and their influences in who we become as individuals as well as as a society. In reality each person with the Sun in Cancer will decide whether this is true of them or whether they find another symbolism and meaning within the Sun in Cancer more appropriate to who they are.
For all symbols have infinite meanings and Sun in Cancer although common to many will have a unique meaning and expression for every individual. Roughly 1 in 12 people may have Sun in Cancer, 1 in 144 people will have the Sun in Cancer in the same house. However only 1 in 432 will have Sun in Cancer, same house and same Venus sign; only 1 in 1,296 will have Sun in cancer, same house and same Venus sign and house. Finally only one in 15,602 will have Sun in cancer, same house, Same Venus sign and house and same moon sign. This rarity increases if we add not only signs and houses but aspects. If you have sun in Cancer and venus in Gemini, they may be semi square, semi sextile or neither.
Our Sun is not defined merely by the house and sign it is in but by the whole natal chart and each chart is unique. This means that each Sun in Cancer has its own unique symbolism and meaning.
Which sign and house it is in, in general ways tends to describe how it appears the personality forms and develops throughout life. However we can only experience our own consciousness and in that sense our consciousness is unique, because it is the only consciousness we will ever experience. The only one we can know, all other consciousness is merely judged on appearance rather than experience. Nobody can give you a definitive meaning of your sun because nobody else will experience it even if they share your sun sign and house. Even if they were born at the exact same time and place as you, their family will not be your family and their environment will not be your environment. Though you may have many similarities their meaning will be just as unique to them as your meaning will be unique to you.
“Everything develops, differentiates, moves towards complexity and refinement and there are laws governing this process. You are part of a whole. When you know as much as possible about the whole, and about the laws of its development, you will understand your place in the world, and your own self.” – Leo Tolstoy ‘A Confession’
The whole you are part of encompasses humanity and all life. Symbolically that is represented by the Zodiac which your natal chart contains with your sun marking your unique contributions to the whole. No person is a Cancer, we all contain the Zodiac and the planets because their symbolism and attributes are common to us all. We all contain the Zodiac, planets, states or elements, the masculine and feminine equally. In interacting with each other we see these symbolic attributes interacting with each other and we all play all the signs and planets at different points in this interaction. We all experience and express both what is labelled feminine and that which is labelled masculine. Only the dead fail to express their Mars just as only those without any preference fail to express Venus. If you have a favourite food, film genre, colour, style of clothing, sexual preference your Venus is being expressed by you, irrespective of gender and sexual orientation. You no more need another person to express this aspect of your identity than you need them to eat for you. Nobody can eat for us we all must eat our own dinner or starve. If you eat your food instead of starving then your Mars is being expressed, your will to survive in a material world in which life is fragile.
The sun also represents our drive to be valued and appreciated, to contribute and feel valued for not just who we are but for our own meaning and sacrifices made in life. This drive for appreciation is the drive to find our own unique greatness. Some think it is in gaining power, some fame, some money, some spiritual recognition and some making academic discoveries – nobody can define your greatness for you, it is linked to finding meaning within your own life. Your greatness and the meaning of your life are uniquely defined by you. It is your own inner recognition of your meaning that makes you great and this is something you will strive for throughout your life. Despite what many may say it is not greater to find meaning in the religious or spiritual than the material, for no path happens to be superior or worth more than another. In fact by disregarding the spiritual we may become more humble and open to the truths of our own nature. It is no coincidence that Jesus ignored the spiritual of his day in search of the tax collectors, prostitutes and thieves. They tend to have a good grasp on their own inner dickhead/ dark wolf that many a spiritual person could learn from. First is that inner dickhead does not need to be glamorised, the beast within, just recognised in its reality.
“Like many men, they had no longer been able to endure anonymity, and that impatience had contributed to leading them to unfortunate extremities. To achieve notoriety it is enough, after all, to kill one’s concierge. Unhappily, this is usually an ephemeral reputation, so many concierges are there that deserve and receive the knife.” – Camus ‘The Fall’
Descartes ‘I think therefore I am’ represents our own unique consciousness through which we experience the outer world. It is subjective I experience the world from my own perspective and you from yours. I recognise not only myself as a subject but also you, and other life forms in general rather than being objects. I experience my own mind but recognise you have one of your own. Objectively, materially or scientifically the sun never rises or sets, it is the rotation of the earth that makes it appear the sun is rising or setting here on earth and we all experience this in different places and at different time each from our own subjective viewpoint.
My sun rise will not be your sun rise, but because I love you my dearest and we both have sun rises we can recognise the beauty in both of them. I love you my reader just as Kierkegaard loved his reader, the individual that was always his Regine Olsen when he wrote to them. I may not know who you are but I have given you a face; one that I love; one that I want to relate to and one I want to say why astrology is important to. This too is subjective you can not objectively be the face I imagine as I write, yet it is necessary for me to relate honestly with you and to care about you. The subjective is necessary, just as necessary as the rational and objective. Without a face you are merely a means to an end. Merely somebody to flatter or clickbait for my advancement. Without a face that is meaningful to me I can not offer you anything that is meaningful. For my dearest one honesty is always subjective.
Objectively or scientifically it is impossible for anybody to have a sun sign since the sun does not rise at all, it is impossible for it to rise in a sign or constellation. Subjectively however we see sunrises, rainbows and sunsets and we find beauty and meaning within them all. That is what consciousness is, the ability to find beauty and meaning within our lives. Computers can translate different languages but they cannot find the beauty, honesty and meaning within poetry for that consciousness is needed.
The sun represents our own unique consciousness in which we can only experience our own sunrises, sunsets, pain, sadness and happiness. The sun thus has been associated with egocentricity because I can only experience my pain although I understand you feel pain too. For me my pain takes priority for it is the only pain I am capable of experiencing and it has an urgency that your pain cannot have for me. Which is why it is almost impossible for us to inflict severe pain on ourselves but we can and do inflict it on others. Even those we love very much. We do that for our own pain is always urgent even if that pain is the fear of abandonment, rejection, abuse or loss of control.
This can sometimes be mistaken for self-centredness but our consciousness is our soul, spirit, mind, ghost or immaterial aspect of ourselves. This is not something separate from the material world if it were I would not be able to raise my arm for my arm is made of matter: atoms, electrons, quarks and bosons. I have a spiritual or nonmaterial existence some call the soul, ghost, mind, spirit or consciousness and in astrology this is represented by the sun which appears to us to rise and set each day or to be subjectively born and die each day although it does neither. In the moments between life and death we find our own meaning and greatness like the homeless woman in the poem (see picture above).
The sun also represents free will my arm does not rise because of some chain reaction that started with the ‘big bang’ but because I or my consciousness wills it to. Our sun represents our will to be as Nietzsche called it or our consciousness. For Nietzsche our will to be is the only important aspect of who we are, in the sense that we will ourselves into becoming who we are and in this becoming we find meaning, ethics and values within our own subjective lives. We are conscious of the fact that we exist, that we have choices.
We choose violence or not and in so doing we will into existence our character or personality. We were never born the person that hits, we were born the person that has the capacity to hit or not hit. Who we become is born out of our choices our will to be the person that hits or the person who refuses to do so. We must be honest with each other, the will to hit is strong within us all for it is an easy path to take. If we supplant it with the idea of Karma and or hell doing the hitting for us we are still the will to hit it is just that we have hidden ourselves from our own view. To find the meaning of who we are we cannot hide ourselves. For the bully that punches us in the face wishes us less harm than the bully who would see us in eternal agony. I am the bully of the sword of the mouth, I will not damn you eternally but I will cut you with what I see, especially if I see you cutting others for the same crimes. To wish to damn anybody to spend an eternity in agony is the worst of all sins. I will not damn you but if you choose to look for meaning with me, dearest one you will be cut and you will bleed. For to find meaning we must be honest with each other. None of us possess a truth that can be given, for the truth remains out there and the lie within, all we can do is give the honesty of the lie within us.
“The smug mask of virtue triumphant could be almost as horrible as the face of wickedness it revealed.” Terry Pratchett ‘Carpe Jugulum’
The sun represents our own unique consciousness (our subjectivity). Just as you cannot experience my pain you cannot tell what I find offensive. The swastika may for example be offensive to some who associate it with the Nazis however for others they may associate it with the original Indian mythology and have a completely different view. This is because we as conscious beings ascribe meanings to symbols. Which means that all astrology symbols have infinite possible meanings. Although I will give you some meanings it is you who possess your own symbols and it is you that must ultimately ascribe meaning to them and they may be different to mine because your cultural heritage may be different to mine. This you are right to do so, for only you can find meaning within your life and your reality; it is only you that can understand your cultural heritage; how it uses symbols and how those symbols and myths are meaningful to you. It is you that will understand your own rich mythological heritage and see its patterns everywhere you go and in everything you read.
This is what astrology is, it is not science it does not deal with the material that is astronomy and physics; astrology is the meaning we ascribe to stars and planets in the sky as symbols that we relate to as conscious beings. Neither Saturn or Mercury can physically cause your computer to break but they do symbolise how we can consciously perceive these events. We perceive Mercury going retrograde because that is what it looks like from our perspective on Earth (subjective) but in the actual material or scientific world Mercury does not go retrograde none of the planets change direction of their orbits or enter constellations. So we say Mercury is retrograde and we are right to do so because this is how it appears to us. We can only ever say how things appear to us. For we can only ever know how things appear to our consciousness, to be.
C S Lewis puts this best in ‘Voyage of the Dawn Treader’, when Eustace says in our world stars are giant balls of gas and Aslan replies that even in your world that is not what stars are only what they are made of. what they are is subjective, desire comes from desiderate – (the star descended below the horizon) desire for the star that is no longer visible and all our desires are subjective. The two brightest ‘stars’ in the sky are Venus and Jupiter symbols of love, hope and faith. (1 Corinthians 13: 13 – and now these three remain faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.) What Venus and Jupiter are to us is symbolic and meaningful. What the sun, moon and planets are made of is objective and part of astronomy; what they mean to us as symbols of different aspects of our consciousness that is astrology.
“‘THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN’…’Really? Then what would have happened, pray?”A MERE BALL OF FLAMING GAS WOULD HAVE ILLUMINATED THE WORLD'” – Terry Pratchett ‘Hogfather’
For it is our consciousness that defines humanity, Data in ‘Star Trek’ is alive because he is conscious despite being non-organic. Do you remember your first pet and how you loved it before you knew what death felt like. That is the sun our consciousness grasping the symbolism of Pluto, Scorpio and the 8th house – something we will all do in life irrespective of our different natal charts. Part of consciousness is grasping the fact that we exist and one day we will cease to exist Data in ‘Star Trek’ grasps this and fears non-existence yet he sacrifices his existence for the benefit of others. This makes him not only conscious but human for he finds meaning in the sacrifice and in his existence thus death loses its sting. Data is human because he wills himself to be human, he creates his own humanity in his own image of what he believes humanity is, of what humanness is. He does this in the community, family and the environment that is the SS Enterprise, his moon or ‘we’ reflecting the light of his sun his consciousness.
“YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET – Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME … SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.” – Terry Pratchett ‘Hogfather’
Facts are objective, truths are subjective unique to ourselves; astrology and the natal chart represent our unique subjective truths about what it is to be alive, to live and to experience the material world and all the other conscious beings that inhabit it. Because astrology and truth are subjective I can only give you my subjective truths of the meanings I find within astrology. This is not because I am right or know all the answers (my answers are, my answers and they may be wrong for you) but because my truths and meaning are all I can give you. You my friend, my dearest one, are free to take my meanings or not, you are free to find your own meaning and your own answers to your life. For it is your life and its meaning must be true and unique to you.
For you my dearest one are searching for the meaning of you and I cannot give you that, I cannot mold you into something I want that is meaningful to me, I can only give you meanings I have found. If I gave you meaning it would be the meaning of you that I want you to have not the meaning of you that is your truth and your reality. I can only give you, your meaning to me and this is insufficient so I give you the means to search for the meaning of you in astrology.
Asterisk means little star. We can use it in search engines to substitute any letter or number. The little star symbolises them all and as such h*ll can be: hill, hell, hall and so on. Depending on what letter we choose for the asterisk we will have completely different word, meaning and definition. For those of you interested 42 is the binary number of asterisk in ASCII, the answer to the ultimate question in ‘Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’ . Depending on what letter you choose to represent it, your word will have its own meaning and its own definition. ‘In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was with God, and the WORD is God’. Your word will define your God or Gods and your image.
“The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues.” – ‘Moving Pictures’ Terry Pratchett
However one thing you are not is a cheap one dimensional caricature of a human being, nobody ever was a cheap astrology meme. You have depth and complexity which can never fully be represented by the largest tomb never mind a word or sentence. I cannot create your meaning only accept it is your meaning, because loving you is accepting the meaning you give to your life. It is accepting your meaning as being the most centrally important thing to you, even if it differs from my meaning, contradicts it or frustrates it. For I will want you to be my kind of Christian Anarchist, my kind of astrologer, see the world as I do and have the same understanding of my culture. I will want to make you in my image and you were always made in God’s image and whatever that God or Gods is or are, that image is sacred and divine and it is your meaning and reality, nobody but you should ever define it. Just as you can never recreate me in your image, though it is the nature of the beast inside us all that constantly attempts to do so. It is a dishonest man thats says he has no beast inside him attempting to recreate the world in his image, and to find meaning we must be honest or at least attempt it.
“The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.” – Terry Pratchett
I will want to make you in my image because I cannot find your image to make me into it, no matter how hard I try. I do not know your image and this my dearest one frightens me. For how can you accept me if I am not in your image. Since I cannot know your image I want to make it mine that I may be accepted by you. For I sense the ‘we’ is not my own image and yet I can never sense its form or your form only my own.
Thus astrology is there to help you define your individual meaning and reality, not to give you a meaning and reality. You are not defined by your natal chart, you are defined by the meaning and purpose you give your natal chart for all its symbols have infinite meanings and it is you that must chose from those meanings the ones that are your own.
“Generally by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” – Margery Williams ‘Velveteen Rabbit’
I say take my writing as an example of how you can find meaning within astrology but by all means reject, contradict or frustrate those meanings. For example I usually perceive Saturn transits as dropping things, the reality is I have faulty collagen and muscle spasms. Saturn does not make me drop things but when I am more conscious of Saturn I am more conscious of my genetic condition; the reality of my life. Instead of saying Saturn is making me conscious of my genetic condition (which it isn’t, my consciousness of Saturn symbolism is also making me more conscious of my subjective view of reality). I say saturn is making me drop things and I am right to do so, for like sunsets and sunrises this is how it appears to me. In astrology we have the stars and the sky moving and not the Earth because this is how it appears to us, we say the sun is rising; never the Earth is rotating.
It is a subjective truth that the sun rises each day and an objective fact that the sun never rises the Earth merely rotates on its axis. Astrology cannot deal with facts only subjective truths. There are no formulas that can give us subjective truths, no rational means of arriving at them, we find them by recognising they are true to us. If there are any real truths that exist beyond our individual consciousness we cannot reach them for we only have access to our own consciousness. If anything you read does not feel true to you then it is not your subjective truth, just mine, for nobody can give you real truths just their subjective ones. This dear friend is the search for your truth and your meaning so let’s begin. Hopefully you now understand some of the symbolism that the sun contains, on top of that symbolism we must now add the symbolism of its sign.
‘Lately I’ve been, I’ve been losing sleep, Dreaming about the things that we could be’
Sun in Cancer symbolises a fluid, adaptable, responsive and transformative personality. If we consider the four elements to be symbolic of the four normal energy states earth = solid, water = fluid, air = gas and fire = plasma. Fluid is the energy state above solid but below gas. Fluids take on the shape of their containers or environment, they adapt to whatever situation they find themselves in. They are more adaptable and harder to pin down than solid signs and they may have unknown depths or be deceptively shallow, with water signs there is always an unknown mysterious quality to their personality like fluids themselves.
Just as all matter changes energy state so do we except the fixed signs which can’t change, but in general those with Cancer prefer the energy state of water, it is the state of being they feel most comfortable in. Because Cancer is a cardinal sign it is always striving to be in this energy state. This is important because energy dissipates. If you put ice (solid, earth) with steam (gas, air) when they reach equilibrium in temperature both will have turned to water (liquid). Other people and other planets in our natal chart can change our energy state. Fire changes itself and water to air or the gas state, if you are a cardinal sign this is exactly what you are striving not to become. We can say the sun in Cancer in general has a hard time with fire signs because they are striving to remain water, but an even harder time with Aries because it is striving to be Fire and is just as imbalanced by Cancer which is frustrating both.
The fixed signs are their energy states and do not adapt they expect the other to, Leo as the sun’s sign expects to warm you up until you become fire. This is frustrating because Leo cannot understand why you cannot just become fire and has no idea that you have to strive simply to be water and you cannot understand that by Leo’s nature the equilibrium has to be reached one way and that is you doing the thing you are striving not to do. With Aquarius it is even more baffling for the sign of change can’t change because it is fixed and it demands you change state to air. To make matters worse it often decides to help you by chucking lightning bolts at your water. Aquarius can’t understand why you don’t want to be electrocuted and Sun in Cancer can’t understand why it would ever think that helpful.
With mutable signs it doesn’t get any better they are the sign of change and yes they have their preferred state but changing it is not the end of the world. Gemini is willing to change to water or fire as part of an equal equilibrium and cannot see why Sun in Cancer won’t make the same compromise, why it is striving to remain water instead of willing to compromise with them so they can be in equilibrium and communicate effectively. To make matters worse Sun in Cancer instinct is to withdraw to rebalance its water / liquid energy state. For Gemini this feels like they want everything their own way or they leave.
However Sun in Cancer individuals need to remember, issues are common to all the sun signs, it is just that we all have our own unique ways of coping with them. Whether Sun in Cancer individuals are really always striving that is subjective like everything else written here, it is only what it appears like to us the other watching you without knowledge of being you. I can only imagine myself in your shoes with your feet, imagine your reality, I can never actually stand in them except with my own feet. Never know if they pinch or hurt you; never know if the heel is too high or too low for you. Your shoes may fit me perfectly and thus I will never know how much they pinch and hurt you or it may be the otherway round I may never understand how something so uncomfortable on my feet feels fine to you. Just as you are not the sun in Cancer nobody else is the sun in Aries but somebody possessing this attribute. As frustrating as it may be for you to relate to somebody possessing that attribute, it may be more worthwhile and more meaningful than simply relating to another with Sun in scorpio just because they help stabilise that water liquid energy state.
‘But, baby I’ve been, I’ve been praying hard, Said no more counting dollars, we’ll be counting stars, Yeah, we’ll be counting stars’
Sun in Cancer is also in a cardinal sign. Cardinal signs are at the equinox and solstice they represent the start of a season Cancer represents the start of summer. The fixed signs represent the mid season and the mutable signs the ending season. Cardinal signs are always striving to become the season and this gives them a direct and forceful energy that neither the fixed or mutable signs have.
The cardinal signs are also striving for the same mythological importance as the fixed signs. The fixed signs are fixed to the time of the Sumerians, Babylonians and ancient Egyptians.
The mythology of the fixed signs is fixed to the period in time when the sun at the spring equinox rose in Taurus, at the summer equinox in Leo, at the autumnal equinox in scorpio and at the winter solstice in Aquarius. At this time the mythology and symbolism of the stars in constellations were very important as they were calandar markers of the natural seasonal cycle. Horus the solar calf is born anew each year at the Winter Solstice and his wife Hathor represents the spring equinox in Taurus. The waters of EA or Enki the Euphrates and Tigris poured from the shoulders of Aquarius which was slain at the winter solstice and from the slain waters of Aquarius or abzu / apsu mankind is made in the form of agriculture, the absu created the farmer or the garden. We cannot live without access to the abzu, fresh water. These signs are fixed because of the importance of the symbolic meaning to these people at this time and even Time Lords cannot change fixed points in time and space. The age of Taurus is mythic and fixed in our consciousness.
“They will live again in freedom in the garden of the Lord, we will walk behind the ploughshare, we will put away the sword, The chain will be broken and all men shall have their reward” – ‘Do You Hear The People Sing’ epilogue
Eventually the constellations on the horizon at sunrise at the time of the equinoxes and solstice changed to the cardinal signs. This was literally a revolution in heaven and as with all revolutions people strive to cope with the change. Thus the cardinal signs do not just strive to be the new season they also strove to develop the mythological importance of the fixed signs. Aries replaced Taurus as the start of the zodiac but they did not gain the same mythological importance of the fixed signs and we can say the cardinal signs are still striving for this.
Aries strove to come into being, as one of the faintest constellations it was a very minor constellation up to this point and was called the Agrarian worker, farm labourer, peasant, yokel, pagan, plebeian or redneck. The constellation representing the ‘uncultured and uneducated’; the peasant strove to claim its place at the centre of this new era. I am and I want my voice heard. This voice was new, ‘The Age of Taurus’ brought major agricultural development and practice on a large scale which lead to the development of land ownership and a class system that did not exist on this scale before. The Age of Taurus created the peasant. Thus the sign of Aries is ruled by Mars the planet symbolic of the drive for survival that we experience with our first breath. The planet of the spring equinox had moved from Venus (hedonism) to Mars the planet of survival that once represented the heat of the summer solstice in the desert.
The spring was no longer a time of bounty and hedonism to be shared amongst us all, the peasant would not experience hedonism his lot was the constant striving for survival whilst the rich and powerful would experience hedonism like never before. The elite were not about to let the peasant rule the age and so the symbol of the Agrarian worker became the Ram. Enki whose waters were the apsu/absu (Aquarius), was represented as Capricorn the seagoat in the Zodiac. Ancient Egypt he had his equivalent Khnum God of the source of the river Nile and creator of mankind which they represented with Rams horns.
This Sumerians used this in the form of Dumuzid, the shepherd. “Inanna spoke: ‘I bathed for the wild bull, I bathed for the shepherd Dumuzid'” – Inanna or Venus not only has Dumuzid-Abzu replaced the wild bull but she placed the aspects of the bull onto him. “As the farmer, let him make the fields fertile, As the shepherd, let him make the sheepfolds multiply, Under his reign let there be vegetation, Under his reign let there be rich grain.” Dumuzid becomes the symbol for the spring equinox although his month does not begin until the first full moon after the summer solstice.
This is an apt time for Dumuzid spends 6 months in the underworld and months in the heavens, he is celebrated at the time of the crayfish or the crab whose symbol is yin and yang or balance. more importantly it is the time of trying to return to balance from the greatest imbalance: the summer solstice, the longest day or the day of the sun and yet Cancer takes the moon its opposite for a ruler. All the Cardinal signs are striving to return to balance or to maintain their own fragile balance. Capricorn begins on the shortest day; the day of darkness or night; the day of sleep and dreams but it has Saturn the cold hard facts of life and not Neptune the dreamer as its ruler. Neptune does not appear until Pisces which ends just before the spring equinox. Falling asleep under the snow and ice means we are unlikely to ever wake, we may dream one last dream like the homeless women in the poem at the start but that is all we will have. The homeless are always the poor, the peasant and never the elite, their reality is they cannot afford to dream unless they give up their life.
In the story of Cain and Abel, we have a retelling of the Dumuzid myth except it is the farmer, pagan, yokel or the redneck that slays him and that is rejected by God for not being the shepherd but the farmer. The peasant becomes the undesirable killer. The shadowy figure of our nightmares. By the time of the birth of Jesus, the Age of Pisces even Aries as Dumuzid the shepherd is an undesirable. The shepherds like the practitioners of a foreign religions the Magi are the undesirables, this is a new age beginning in which the undesirables or the least are to be the heroes of a new mythology and a new religion.
“For the wretched of the Earth there is a flame that never dies, Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise” – ‘Do You Hear The People Sing’ epilogue
Finally the heavens revolved once more and the sun rose at the spring equinox with the constellation of Pisces. The change goes almost without notice. There is no change in the sign which starts the Zodiac. Pisces and Neptune are part of the mythology of what the Sumerians called the Tiamat. The Tiamat is the great sea dragon. During the Age of Taurus; Thuban, a star in the Draco constellation was the pole star.
The pole star marks roughly the point of the earth’s northern rotational axis Thuban was more accurate than today’s pole star Polaris. Thuban means serpent as does Eve. The constellation of Draco appeared to be wrapped around the Earth’s rotational axis with Thuban, Eve the serpent marking the point from which the heavens rotated. Thus the biblical story has two serpents Draco or Tiamat and Eve the rib of the Tiamat that holds up the world. In Sumerian writing Ninti means both lady life and lady rib, Eve means lady life and serpent.
In Sumerian mythology Tiamat is usurped by Enki and just as he absorbs the Abzu/Apsu he absorbs the Tiamat by having Ninti lady rib/life come from his body. Enki is usurped by Anu and Inanna of Uruk. They too are Usurped by Enlil and finally the last in a line of chief city state deities Marduk usurps them by claiming to slay the Tiamat and place her rib Ninti as the pillar which holds up the world. The Tiamat is usurped by the very thing that creates the peasant and that is the Superpower of the day.
The Tiamat ruled the celestial sea in which the stars, sun, moon and planets sailed across our sky. This fall from grace is marked in the Old Testament and Babylonian mythology. Isaiah 27:1 In that day the Lord with his great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisted the twisted serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea. Revelation 20:2 And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent who is the devil and satan, and bound him for a thousand years.
Thuban was pole star from 3942 BC until 1793 BC, when Kappa Draconis another star in Draco was less than one degree from pole for nearly 200 years and for a thousand years was within 5 degrees of the pole. From 1500 Bc Kochab and Pherkad of Ursa minor served as twin pole stars until 500 AD known as ‘The Indestructibles’ to the ancient Egyptians ‘Ikhemu-sek’, The circumpolar stars do not set or die, they simply rotate around the pole star. Thus the pole star or stars represent destination of the soul and immortality. Thuban fell from its place as the pole star due to the changes in the axial tilt which varies from 22 – 24 degrees and which is also what causes the precession of the equinoxes or simply the astrological ages.
Draco the constellation is not banished for a thousand years it will be 20346 AD before Thuban moves back to pole star and it will continue moving away from the pole until 10,000 AD. Thuban has ceased hydrogen fusion at its core it is now a white giant – Thuban or Eve is becoming ever more distant and she is dying.
The Tiamat ruler of the sea, of the tree of life, Ninti, lady rib, Eve, serpent and mother of all has fallen from the indestructible tree of life and continues to fall. Although she now ruled the spring equinox this is a great fall for her. Eve is dying and she is now demonised and banished by god. Eve is not just a mother, for nobody was ever just a mother. Mother is the largest and most important of all our symbols and Eve was and still is ‘The Mother’. The mother which our world has always revolved around; the mother from which our consciousness stems whether we love or loathe her and often we do both.
The mother that makes you go to the toilet at night before bed whether or not you need to, because even at fifty you can’t get to sleep unless you follow her rules. The mother that always remains a mystery, an illusion and disillusionment. The one who can never live up to our expectations for she is human and cannot fulfil the great symbolism inherent in her name. Yet our world still revolves around her. Whichever God holds her hostage, holds us hostage. Whichever God banishes her, banishes us. The hand that rocked the cradle is us, she is who we are, where we begin and end. When she is demonised and banished so are we. The Age of Pisces is an emotional, religious and spiritual response to our banishment as peasants or the poor; our emotional and religious response to becoming the undesirables of society. Aries still stands at the equinox because we are still the peasant and our mother is still being demonised. Eve or Thuban is blamed for the end of the Age of Taurus, the garden of Eden because when Thuban fell as the polestar or the axial tilt changed the equinox shifted also. Eve falling and Eden going, are caused by the changes to the position of the tree of life. Yet like the sunrise it is subjective, it is the tree of life that appears constant to us and the stars that have fallen from grace.
“Will you join in our crusade, who will be strong and stand by me? Beyond the barricade is there a world you long to see? Do you hear the people sing, say do you hear the distant drums? It is the future that we bring when tomorrow comes” – ‘Do You Hear The People Sing’ epilogue
If you have sun in Cancer, you have your sun in a water sign and they are ruled by the Tiamat or the constellation Draco, just as the earth signs are ruled by the Behemoth or the constellation of the big dipper, Enlil’s plough that turns the heavens.
Thus the signs and the constellations are now separate and Cancer the sign no longer matches Cancer the constellation. Instead Cancer the sign Marks the beginning of a period in the solar cycle starting from the summer solstice 23.5 degrees north and moving gradually to the celestial equator which it reaches at 0 degrees libra the start of fall or autumn. Cancer is striving to become summer. Those with Sun in Cancer are in a sense always striving to become themselves or willing themselves to be. It is in this striving that they find their true nature as do all the cardinal signs.
That leaves a question unanswered has the Age of Aquarius begun, this depends on who you believe. Some have it beginning at the death of God and the ending of the middle ages. Some have it beginning at the time of the intellectual enlightenment. Some say it happened last century and some say it will not occur for hundreds of years. Astrology is subjective, science is meant to be objective, and what is subjective is seen differently and experienced differently. Yes there is something Aquarius in the death of God and the intellectual enlightenment. At the same time there is also something very Pisces about the fact that I need to put intellectual before the enlightenment, something very Pisces about the beliefs people hold on the Age of Aquarius. I would say there is no astrological defining line for the age, but what we definitely are in is the transition period. The point where the river meets the sea and the waters are mingled. Yet even this is complicated for Aquarius the river lies in the sea and its waters have always mingled with hers. It is not until they evaporate and return to the land or the Earth that the river takes form once more.
‘I see this life like a swinging vine, swing my heart across the line, In my face is flashing signs, Seek it out and ye shall find’
In mythology Cancer was the sign of the Crayfish and it is connected to our environment as the source of all things. The crayfish prefer dark waters that offer them safety from predators. This draws parallels with our first environment, the womb the safe dark waters of our mother and our first experience of being a ‘we’. our first experience of something larger than yourself which encompasses us and gives us life. This is why we mistakenly assume Cancer to represent only the mother but a battlefield is an environment just as much as a womb is and all environments affect how we grow and develop; all environments encompass us, give us life or take it from us. The womb is a female reproductive organ it is not a female environment, just a necessary human environment, our first environment and one we cannot survive or live without having been in.
Cancer represents our environment and that is neither male or female in the traditional sense (for there was no real male and female environments ever) and men with Sun in Cancer are no more likely to mother us than men with Sun in Aries the same is also true of women. What they are more likely to do is be very aware of their environment now and in childhood and how that shapes us and shaped them. Sun in Cancer is not ‘The Mother’ it is one whose consciousness is always striving to understand ‘The Mother’ because that is where they came from and that is what shapes their life.
In mythology our environment is often symbolised by the womb because it is the first environment we experience. In Hindu mythology the first environment of our soul is the testes of the father, then the womb of the mother and the last is our own body. In reality this is trying to grasp that our own birth is interdependent on the birth of both our parents, on the birth of our grandparents. In Genesis it is Abel’s bloods that cry out, those who cannot be because he has been slain. This is why the Jewish believe anybody who saves one life saves a thousand because they save the lives of those descendents as well. Who we are, our culture and environment depends on our parents, our grandparents and great grand parents. We could not exist without any of them. This is true even if we are adopted. We may have a different culture to them but we have that culture because of them, because they existed and because of their actions.
In Hinduism there are many womb myths. Abhimanyu the son of Arjuna, remembers his father telling his mother a battle strategy whilst in the womb and uses it later in life. Prahlada means filled with Joy and whilst in his mother’s womb he heard the devotional prayers and stories of Vishnu. Although Prahlada’s father was evil he becomes a great king because he is peaceful and virtuous. Ashtavakra grandfather was a seer and great teacher, whilst in his mother’s womb he hears all his grandfather’s teaching and his father’s. Ashtavakra becomes so knowledgeable that in the womb he corrects his father eight times and is cursed by him to have eight deformities. However because he is so wise he cures himself of his deformities by bathing in the river Samanga and goes on to become a greater teacher and Atman.
‘Old but, I’m not that old, Young but, I’m not that bold, And I don’t think the world is sold, I’m just doing what we’re told’
Those with the sun in Cancer recognise it is our interaction with our environment and that includes family and the community we live in that forms who we are and shapes who we strive to be. To learn military tactics we need an environment in which we are exposed to them, to learn and understand religious and philosophical thought we need an environment in which we are exposed to such thought. Through interaction and questioning our environment we refine who we are, what we believe and what has meaning for us and this is the striving of Cancer the sign.
It is through the land that we get food, water and shelter the resources necessary for survival. How we value, use and respect those resources and the land of our birth or mother Earth, that is an important feature of sun in Cancer consciousness. As is the fact that we are all interdependent on the Earth although some of us have more access to its resources than others. Whether that is access to the land itself, food, health or education.
Sun in Cancer is recognition of the importance of our environment. That environment determines our relationship with symbols and rituals, whatever culture we are raised in irrespective of whether we believe in a particular religion or not it is how we learn about symbology and ritual. That means we generally learn in the West the symbolism and ritual of Christmas whether or not we are Christian. Thus we use our understanding of Christmas, Easter and many other events to understand Divali, Eid, Chinese New Year or any other cultural festival. We understand the symbolism of others through understanding the symbolism of our own culture. Which means none of us are ever just Atheist, but Christian Atheist, Buddhist Atheist, Hindu Atheist, Jewish Atheist, Catholic Atheist, Protestant Atheist or Muslim Atheist. Atheism is also placed in a religious culture, there is always a particular God or Gods they refuse to believe in and that is the God or Gods of their culture and religious heritage. For Atheism cannot exist outside of religion, could not have existed before religion and cannot exist after Religion. It cannot replace religion any more than a vaccine can replace a disease. Atheism is sometimes a vaccine refuses to catch the disease of the crowd, when it stands alone. Yet when the Christian is the one standing alone it is them that refuse to catch the disease of the crowd. Both can be the disease and both can be the vaccine but neither can exist without the other.
‘I I I I feel something so right by doing the wrong thing, And I I I I feel something so wrong by doing the right thing’
Our personality or consciousness is like a wormhole through time and space, it is who we are from the moment of birth until death. It is in constant change and yet we feel ourselves to be the same person as the day before this is due to the sun which gives us a sense of consistency. The sun provides self consistency as well as holding the planets of our solar system together.
Cancer is a feminine sign, this has nothing to do with gender, sexual orientation or sexuality but describes an aspect of human consciousness. Feminine in this sense describes our emotional needs, responses and growth.
Cancer is our emotional relationship to our environment. How we think of Earth in emotional terms, our nationality, culture, family and our community – how we develop our emotional roots and how they come to define us.
“She fell from the sky, she fell very far and Kansas she said was the name of the star” – ‘Wizard of Oz’
The ruler of Cancer is the moon. The moon represents our emotional needs including and especially nurturing. It represents our family, community and nationality everything that gives us a sense of identity, roots and belonging. As children we learn to imitate the emotional nurturing we see around us, not just the nurturing of children but the emotional nurturing of each other within all families and close romantic relationships. We start imitating from an early age the way we care for each other from saying I love you to bringing mum breakfast in bed on Mother’s Day. We learn to care for our pets not just physically but emotionally through petting and nursing them just as we learn to care for our friends by sharing and listening to them. Just as we learn about love and caring for others through imitating our parents, our family and our community; we also learn about our culture through imitation and play this is how we learn our rituals.
“Ye cannae shove yer granny aff a bus, Naw ye cannae shove yer granny aff a bus, Ye cannae shove yer granny cos she’s yer mammy’s mammy, Naw ye cannae shove yer granny aff a bus” – traditional Scottish song
When pets die as children we have funerals so that we learn our rituals of saying goodbye and letting go. It is us that as children demand the ritual, demand to participate in it. For in our rituals we have the path we walk through grief, and we as children need to learn to walk that path. Through learning the rituals we learn how to grieve, and more importantly we learn how to grieve as part of our culture. In my family and perhaps all Scottish families, the big symbol is the of the granny. My cousin who died is with my granny. When my grandpa died when I was a little girl, it was granny Kirwin that came for him. The granny as the mother of our mother holds a special symbolism. How we deal with that symbolism is reflected in the chorus of the song. “Singing, I will if you will, so will I” – the most significant symbolism of the moon the ‘we’ or the crowd. For good and for bad the crowd empowers us to accomplish what we cannot do on our own.
It is through the crowd that the Iraqi individual can express his anger at both Saddam Hussein and the disempowerment by the West. In the crowd they can topple his statue, symbolic of toppling him and in doing so they take back the power we had removed from them. In the crowd they can react to the powerless state of the single individual against dictators and Superpowers. It is the crowd that burns the American flag and not the individual for the individual is always powerless to do so.
“Ye can shove yer ither granny aff a bus, Ye can shove yer ither granny aff a bus, Ye can shove yer other granny cos she’s yer daddy’s mammy, Ye can shove yer ither granny aff a bus”
There is an important lesson to be learnt from the moon it operates in rings and each ring is bigger than the last but the bond is weaker. The first ring is our immediate family and this bond is strongest. The second is extended family and friends and this bond is weaker although still generally strong. After this is our community again this is weaker but still strong enough to pull us to work together for our mutual benefit. After this is states, counties or shires again the bond is weaker but not as weak as the bond of national identity. After this we are bonded by general cultural and religious beliefs, a far weaker bond and finally the weakest bond as part of all humanity.
Humans are biologically social animals and we are biologically programmed to live in a community and have a family. That community has always had a maximum before bonds breakdown; that means if you were raised in a village you have a bond with its inhabitants but if you were born in a town or city you have a bond with an area within the town or city – you will be from the Bronx or Queens and New York is your extended community just as you have an extended family with a weaker bond.
Everybody has a personal space, a buffer zone between them and the rest of humanity only friends, family and loved ones can enter our personal space anybody else and we feel threatened it is an act of aggression to enter that buffer zone. We also have a buffer zone that is our home, it is an act of aggression to enter another person’s home uninvited. Then our communities and our nations. We have buffer zones around our communities and our nations. Wolf packs also have buffer zones and it is an act of aggression for any of the packs to enter them, the same is true of street gangs they have buffer zones between them and it is an act of aggression to violate them.
This means we can’t have the same emotional bonds with everybody or be ‘global citizens’, because we always belong to a specific area, we always have a home, an identity and a family. Thus we can only respect and understand others bonds to some extent and the personal space of others. I can’t define what being Scottish is, I only know that it is a part of me and if I can’t define being Scottish other people cannot fully understand it. What they can understand and respect is that it is a vital part of who I am. When I write I have to write as a scottish, protestant with a celtic animist culture and a large extended but close family. More importantly they need to understand I am not American or any other nationality and like everybody else I don’t want to be and I cannot be. I can’t be American, it is not my culture and it is not because it is inferior or superior to my culture, it is just a different culture.
This does not mean I value other cultures less, it just means I see all cultures through this lens because this is the only way I can see anything. This also means that I have a relatively high personal space area, not only is the population of Scotland lower than many countries, I have never lived in a city. I live in a low density populated area of a low density country. That means we have both the time and the space to connect more deeply, to remember what others have told us. If you tell me you were abused as a child I will remember, but this also means I expect the same from you. I cannot change my culture or the way I relate any more than you can. How this forms your expectations of others, how you expect to participate in the ‘we’ of family, personal relationships or peers. I cannot describe your culture, family and heritage only my own. I can use mine as an example but you will have your own unique family situation within a culture and a community. This will shape you in ways that are so diverse that nobody will ever be able to define them all to you.
The Sun is the consciousness, it represents our I am, the moon is our environmental influences which includes family and community it represents our we are. We are Scottish, American, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Nigerian, Russian, Hindu, Muslim, Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Buddhist, Celtic supporters, Rangers supporters, Red Socks supporters, AC Milan supporters and many other things for we are tribal.
The moon acts as a stabiliser to the Earth, like a bike with stabilisers, the earth tilts and this controls the celestial position of the Axis and the celestial equator but this event is balanced due to the moon which makes the Earth behave like a giant spinning top that cannot tip over. The moon creates the stability necessary for life on Earth.
The sun in Cancer is aware that they perceive everything through their own lens. This means none of us are spiritual but not religious and if you don’t believe that read on for you are denying you have parents. Religious is how we get the tools to be spiritual and they are passed on to us by our family, community and culture. We may reinvent ways to use these religious tools but we cannot change the tools we have. For there are many types of Atheist, there are Catholic Atheists, Muslim Atheists, Jewish Atheists, Protestant Atheists, Hindu Atheists and Buddhist Atheists but those tools are what they were born with and Catholic Atheists write as Catholic Atheists just as I write as a Scottish, Protestant with Animist Celtic cultural influences. I cannot write as a Hindu or a Hindu Atheist because that is not my culture. Even if I wanted to become Hindu I would always write as a Scottish, Protestant with Animist celtic cultural influences trying to assimilate Hinduism into my cultural and religious being or heritage.
When I write of Sumerian mythology I write through that Scottish Protestant with Animist celtic cultural influences lens. I am never going to write about how positive thinking will give you everything you want because that is anti-animist. Animist means believing that animals, nature and the weather has a mind of their own. If you don’t believe weather has a mind of its own then you need to spend a day in Scotland. However it means that I can’t put my mind on a pedestal and believe it is the one controlling everything or that it has some divine right to get its own way, that anybody that upsets me should be hit by a bus and we should call it karma because the universe or God is designed to punish people I don’t like. That is not how I see Hinduism or Karma any more than people burning in hell for eternity for offending me is my view of Christianity. My cat does what she wants regardless of what I think because she has a mind of her own and my mind cannot over rule hers only respect it and relate to it. That does not mean Celts don’t think positively they do, they just don’t expect the universe to conform to their wishes or will instead they expect to relate to it and the different consciousnesses it contains. The God that holds my mother captive holds me captive and I can battle him or her but I cannot change my captivity. The beast within is only driven to recreate in my image, the image of the God or Gods that holds me captive.
We are all captive to our moon. In the Plato’s cave allegory we are all inside a cave in the darkness. Outside there is a fire and puppets which we never see only the shadows the puppets make on the wall. We mistake the puppets’ shadows for reality. Unfortunately the Matrix is wrong we cannot ever venture out from that cave into the real, we can only ever jump from one matrix to another but all of them are an illusion. The moon is the illusion of the ‘we’ that we hold and we can experience many cultures or caves but they too contain mere illusions of the ‘we’. For whatever cave I am in, I cannot ever see the moon just the light of my sun; my consciousness is always reflected back at me; I cannot ever see us my love and dearest just an image of me within us. When the new moon stops shining I cannot even see myself, my reflection within us and I know that what ‘we’ are has always been invisible, beyond my view. I cannot give you meaning because when I look at you I see my reflection and never you. I see my reflection as the glow that makes your face radiate the light of angels for that split second of time when I feel the connection between us strongest.
Though my consciousness is the only one I experience, I cannot ever see the light of my sun unless it is reflected back at me. Whilst I can never see ‘we’ in you my dearest I see the beauty of my own light and this is your precious gift to me. For to reflect the beauty of another’s soul back at them is in itself divine. For we sense the beast within more than the beauty which seems absent until it is reflected back. I sense the beast within more stronger, the urge to recreate in my image until your smile turns to dazzling sunlight and in that moment the beast rests. It is enough that whatever the ‘we’ is, it can and does reflect me even if it remains an unknown to me. Then I see the beauty in my own words and the beast returns and the light reflected in your face is gone once more for I am forever dazzled like Narcissist by my own reflection, by my own consciousness. For my consciousness is the cave that cannot be escaped.
When it comes to the moon I can only write from my personal perspective, because the moon is also subconscious I can never find it all, the cave I am in always remains an unknown to me, no matter how hard I try to explore it. The moon is everything we absorb from our environment without even being consciously aware of it. The Hindu womb myths are examples of that, foetus cannot consciously learn scriptures in the womb or military tactics but foetus like all humans do absorb things from their environment without consciously realising it. There is no intrinsic right or wrong, murder is wrong because our environment says so and from birth we absorb this and we believe it to be intrinsic, it is not intrinsic it is just a universal in our environment – it is wrong for any of us to commit murder.
Just as nobody tells Scots to remember the dead at New Year, that is part of our culture and our environment and we subconsciously take in the many aspects of the meaning New Year has for us from birth. That means even if the rest of the world think New Year’s Eve is the same as Hogmanay or Auld Year’s night Scots know there is a whole load of meaning to the old year’s end and it is just as important as the New Year’s beginning and we sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ at the end of Auld Year’s night, celebrate New Year and toast auld Acquaintances in that order because they all have their own meaning.
Most probably wherever you are in the world you will do the same at New Year but unless you are brought up in a Scottish culture those meanings are lost on you and you are performing our rituals without fully knowing their meaning to us. The things with most meaning to us are never consciously taught they are absorbed through our culture. Because they are absorbed they are often taken for granted or we don’t recognise that we know these things until we find ourselves in a culture where they are missing.
This is true for Scots celebrating Christmas it is not our rituals, apart from wishing people a Merry Christmas. Wishing people a Merry Christmas means peace on Earth and goodwill to all men – the presents and decorations is for the kids and there is no meaning in them except for commercialism. I have a nativity set and it looks pretty but it has no meaning to me, just as I have several Buddhas that look beautiful but hold no meaning to me because they are not my rituals however beautiful those rituals may be. That does not make them less to me for I find my God in Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism and Astrology. I find the same truths in them and the same symbolic search for meaning within our lives.
This is why we can never be spiritual and not religious because religion is something we absorb from our environment and it is the tools that allow us to express our spirituality irrespective of whether it is formally recognised as a Religion. I cannot learn to feel Catholic any more than I can learn to feel French, to think as a Catholic or to think as a French woman. This is true even if we dislike our nationality or our religion we cannot unbecome them because they feel like an uncomfortable part of us, just as we cannot unbecome our family because it is an uncomfortable part of us. Our parents remain our parents no matter how many issues we have, we are the person who has issues with our parents we are never the person who is spiritual but has no parents.
We all have issues with our parents for their symbolism is too great for them to fulfil. This we experience if we ourselves become parents. For as parents we love our children but we are not driven by this love but by the fact of their dependence upon us. Our children are more important than our own needs and lives because they depend upon us for survival. Thus we take second place to them and they are always our passion. In our passion is always despair for we cannot fulfil that symbolism. We cannot do anything but fail to live up to it. Kierkegaard reflects this in saying that in relationship to God we are always in sin. for in God, Jupiter is our ideals and our symbolism and we cannot fulfil either. We all fail constantly as parents, grace is merely the difference in our human potential as parents and our ideal. Grace makes up the difference and without it we are constantly failing or a constant failure. This is true of all things I sense your Venus ideal of the perfect lover just as you sense I have one yet we can never know each other’s ideal. However because it is an ideal we will be by our nature constantly failing to fulfil it, or a constant failure as a lover. Grace is the difference between our potential as human lovers and as ideal lovers, without grace we fail no matter the synastry aspects in a chart. We fail because we will not allow ourselves to be and if we will not allow ourselves to be we will not allow the other to be.
My dearest one I do not project an ideal onto you, you just sense one, and I never ask you to live upto my ideal for I know that is impossible. Though my beast is narcissistic it does not ask you to become my ideals, for that would make you unobtainable to me for we never reach our ideal only the point where grace is necessary. My beast would make you share my ideals so that I can understand the monster within as I do my own, my beast does not want the unattainable made flesh for that is never utopia but dystopia. Thus my beast only wants to share the symbolism of my moon it does not want you to make its ideals reality, just to share the dream. Yet it is my dream and you must find your own. All we can ever hope for is the respect for each other’s dream whatever they may be. This my dearest one is hard enough for most of us to do.
‘I could lie, couldn’t I, couldn’t I, Every thing that kills me makes me feel alive’
As said at the beginning it is the sun that holds all the planets in our solar system in orbit. Because Cancer is a cardinal sign the sun is always striving to combine the different elements of who they are into a complete whole. that striving is more fluid than the other cardinal signs which means they are constantly striving to find a true shape or form.
Cancer is also a feminine sign which means that this striving to find a true form is of an emotional nature. Sun in Cancer strives to find its true emotional self. When those with Sun in cancer are struggling with this they can adopt their opposite attribute the moon in Gemini. Gemini owes as much of its mythology to the twin pole stars Kochab and Pherkad as it does to the constellation. This sign is about sharing and recognising we are not alone and we cannot accomplish much on our own. The North Celestial pole lay between these twin stars 1,000 years ago together they pointed the weary traveller true north.
The direction Gemini points in is that of the cynic. Not the contemporary meaning of the term but the philosophical. The cynic steps back from family, community, national identity and cultural heritage. The Cynic recognises themselves as a fallen animal not a fallen angel. Cynic comes from the word for dog, and dogs are generally content with what they have, they do not work themselves to death for a house, car or whatever latest gadget is on the go. Cynics step back from commercialism from the crowd.
Cynics step back from the pull of the ‘we’ which is the crowd, our family, community and our peers. For the crowd does what the individual never does, it lynches people because of the colour of their skin, if the crowd happens to be to the right they will lynch the poor black man and if to the left they will lynch the poor white man. In either case it matters not for the peasant’s skin is always the wrong colour and he will never be judged on his actions for what the peasant does is always deemed unimportant. For to give worth to the peasants actions is to compensate them equally with the millionaire. Thus the left will hang the peasant with the penis and the right the peasant with a vulva. The left do so in the claim of equality, equality in hanging for being a peasant. There is never equality of the peasant to the millionaire, for the peasant must remain the peasant for a left to exist and usurp their power.
The cynic was trained to endure public humiliation. For the cynic offends everybody equally by their refusal to conform to peer norms. Diogenes masturbated in public and said if only hunger could be satisfied as easily as sexual urges. The cynic couple Crates and Hipparchia are said to have sex in public. Diogenes humiliated the great minds of the day such as Plato and Parmenides. Not only were cynics not intimidated by intellectuals but they used satire to show they were actually ridiculous. Just as they used satire to show the ridiculous nature of emperors, slavery, sexism and putting others on pedestals.
The lesson of stepping back and distancing ourselves emotionally is that we see the ridiculousness of it all. The ridiculousness of wanting idiots to respect us because we put the idiots on pedestals. The cynic sees the ridiculous in families, community, culture and national identity. They see the ridiculousness in what we take seriously and in what offends us. In a world where we can be more offended by swearing than the bombing of children – having sex in public forces us to look at the preposterous values we hold. In a world where we judge people not by their actions but whether they have a vulva, penis, black, white, homosexual or heterosexual; it is good to step back and question the left and right’s motives for dividing us by identity and not our actions.
At the time when the constellation Gemini marked the summer solstice and the twin stars marked the North celestial axial tilt a new religion was born Christianity. Jesus shows some cynic tendencies in his teachings, parables about praying in public to sound spiritual and fasting to look spiritual. Jesus takes a cynical stance on our reasons for our religious actions. The widow’s mite is ironic although less understood that way today. Today to understand it we need to think of the wealth of large religious institutions such as the Catholic church. Our parable needs to have the pope take the poor widow’s last penny for the upkeep of his vast vatican residency. When Jesus say’s she gave her all he is also saying the pope took her all, the vastly rich pope took all her money and left her destitute and looked down his nose at the poor widow at the same time. This is not an attack on Catholicism you can substitute Billy Graham, Bill Clinton, Hilary Clinton, Bush or Obama if you like. You can substitute any president sitting in a white house paid for by widows, homeless people and any other current ‘undesirables’.
Their message was a simple one, know the difference between what you need and what you want. Underneath it all we are all simply human beings, irrespective of: family, religion, education, culture, colour or gender and differentiating between each other is ridiculous. Moon in Gemini teaches us to strip away all our differences and see the ridiculous in who we are and in what we value as well as what upsets us.
Moon in Gemini is the child trying to understand the lunacy that is family, the child that observes there is one law for the adults and another for the children or the peasant. Moon in Gemini knows we rarely practice what we preach. Moon in Gemini asks you to turn it around judge yourself the way you judge others, and give them the benefit of the doubt you give yourself. It also says to give yourself the grace you give to friends.
Note if you have the moon in Gemini it does not necessarily mean that you will do the above only that you have that capacity within you, but so do all of us it is just easier for some to do so, to distance themselves from the symbol that is the moon and recognise what it reflects about ourselves and our communities both good and bad. It is easier for Moon in gemini to view humanity as the children of ‘The Mother’ and to understand we are all subject to that influences whatever our culture may be, it is defined by ‘The Mother’ and that makes us all equally born into the ‘Matrix’ and siblings.
‘I feel her love, And I feel it burn down this river every time, Hope is a four letter word, make that money watch it burn’
The sun is at the centre of our solar system it holds the planets in orbit. Similarly the sun in astrology holds the planets together to form a united view of what it is for us to be human with a consistent self identity. By understanding in general how the sun in Cancer relates to the planets it holds in orbit we develop a deeper understanding of it.
‘And I feel something so wrong by doing the right thing, I could lie, couldn’t I, couldn’t I, Everything that drowns me makes me want to fly’
The masculine planets are Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Uranus.
The sun represents our will to be or our consciousness, our drive to excel, succeed and shine in life. When we have difficulty in expressing our sun’s attributes we are more likely to express this drive negatively through our moon in an exaggerated demand for nurturing and expression of emotional insecurities.
Although this is true of all sun signs it is especially true for the sun in Cancer.
Mars represents our basic instinctual drives for food, shelter and sex. These survival instincts are controlled by the oldest parts of our brain including the amygdala which responds to threats. These parts are the oldest for good reason Mars rules the drives that controls all life to survive and to reproduce. Mars rules ‘The biological imperative’ to reproduce and all survival instincts stem from this biological imperative and all genders are impacted by it equally. This includes our maternal and paternal instincts for reproduction itself is meaningless unless what we reproduce survives until reproductive age and this is what is meant by biological fitness. Mars does not rule survival of the fittest for that is an economic belief based on a misunderstanding of biological fitness. Most Mars instincts and drives are unconscious like breathing. Mars is who we are at our most natural level, there is no pretense to Mars, it relates honestly and openly to the world it is in.
We are always frightened of our Mars because of this, for it will not try to take another image, it will not be anything other than what it is and if we are rejected it is because our Mars is rejected. Our Mars refuses to lie to get what it wants, for in truth we cannot get what we want by our Mars lying. For if we want another they are not an object to possess, but a subject and in lying the subject never buys us but the imitation we have presented them with. Mars knows that when it is naked the imitation and the illusion will have gone. Mars knows that it is not that we want another but that we want another to want us. To want us another has to see us. Mars is bold and brave because it has to be, it stands naked in all its faults to be judged on the truth of what it actually is no more or no less. It stands naked truthfully in front of Venus, open to rejection, open to its own vulnerabilities and open to the knowledge it can be crushed at any moment.
In order for Venus to love us we all must allow our Mars to be vulnerable, naked and capable of being crushed. Since this is a risk we both must take my best beloved, Mars is also symbolic of mutual trust or lack. If it will not stand naked there is no trust, no love ever received. If it does it is because it trusts that the Venus it stands before is not cruel, vicious or mean. It trusts that even if Venus rejects it is a compassionate rejection and not a bloodbath.
We say love is unconditional but love has always been conditional on Mars courage to stand naked before Venus to be judged. When Jesus says to not only give your coat but your cloak, he is saying to stand naked in judgement. This has a meaning similar to above but to stand naked in front of those that would judge you is also an act of defiance.
“Do you hear the people sing, singing the song of angry men? It is the music of a people who will NOT be slaves again, when the beating of your heart echoes the beating of the drum, life is about to start when tomorrow comes” – ‘Do you Hear The People Sing’
Mars refuses to be the slave of reason, of men or of oppression. Reason oppresses by its need of justification, all cruelty has been justified by humanity from war to slavery. Mars is the soldier, the warrior because reason created the soldier and the warrior. Mars goes to war with reasoning, with reason creating a purpose for him that is invented, unnatural and dishonest.
The amygdala which responds to threat is moderated by oxytocin (love hormone), in Capgras syndrome this process is disrupted and that lack of emotional response leads patients to believe their loved ones are imposters. Far from Mars making us irrational it is a necessary part of what makes us rational. Mars recognises friend from foe.
“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” – David Hume
Mars is also very much associated with Dopamine, cortisol and ephedrine rush whether naturally or chemically. When we talk about a rush of blood to the head we are talking about a rush of these chemicals to the brain.
“Do you want a line of this? Are you a socialist? I’m doing fine, Buzzing all the time, Just one hit, And I feel great, And I support the welfare state” – Jarvis Cocker, ‘Cocaine Socialism’
Mars is action and reaction, it is life itself. Mars is what makes the Earth a living system it is the true face of mother nature, red in tooth and claw. Mars is life and passing judgement on him cannot change the necessity of a balanced ecosystem, of a healthy population or of the complexity of the carbon cycle. Mars says this is what it is to be alive: to struggle, fight, to feel hunger, thirst, to be eaten and to die.
“Stand here until I fill all your heart’s desires, Because I’m going to buy this place and see it burn, Do back the things it did to you in return, he said I’m gonna buy a gun and start a war, If you can tell me something worth fighting for” – Coldplay, ‘Rush of Blood to the Head’
Mars is direct and honest in its actions, it is not manipulative, sly or secretive and this makes Mars an easier energy to deal with in others. It is an honest disagreement and not false friendship with manipulation and betrayal.
“The heart has its reasons which reason is not acquainted with.” Blaise Pascal
Mars is represented by an arrow or ti, life. Like the arrow Sagittarius shoots. Ti is the the sacred point of the axial tilt and eternal life, so Mars also represents an aspect of the divine common to all life. all life is commanded to go forth and multiple so sex is part of the divine or sacred. Nobody understands this more than those with Mars in sagittarius. Even if they say they are Atheist they are in a relationship with God it has just always been a complicated one. Sex is how we express Hallelujah, the ecstasy of the life given to us and how we rebel and defy the divine or sacred. This too is a religious expression. It is also often how we fall from grace and thus it makes us compassionate, because it makes us human.
“Red: the blood of angry men, Black: the dark of ages past, Red: a world about to dawn, Black: the night that ends at last”
“Red: I feel my soul on fire, Black: my world if she’s not there, Red: the colour of desire, Black: the colour of despair” – ‘Red and Black’
Sex is how we also often rebel against the church or religious authorities. This is different to defying God, this is a protest about what man holds important and the dogmas they force upon us. ‘The Devils of Loudun’ by Aldous Huxley deals with this. It is the true story of Urbain Grandier a priest who was burnt at the stake for witchcraft. At the centre of this is the fact that he wrote condemning the enforced celibacy of the priesthood, and was critical of cardinal Richelieu.
Sex is also the expression of ‘The Biological Imperative’ to reproduce our species, regardless of gender Mars represents our OWN imperative it is NOT our ideal man. It is not male libido it is humanity’s libido and it is owned by women just as it is owned by men. In this way Mars represents our desire to select the best partner for reproducing or having sex with irrespective of our or their gender. Mars represents one aspect of sexual preference a primal one that is unconscious, based on the same instincts as all organisms to improve the gene pool. Venus rules the other aspect of sexual preference our own individual tastes, all of us own both aspects equally.
“No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.” – Samuel Johnson
Mars is an arrow because ninti lady life, lady arrow and lady rib is also a phallic symbol. ‘The Biological imperative’ is so called because it is the sources of all urges or drives. Adult Mayflies don’t have a mouth because they reproduce and then die, eating is unnecessary to the imperative. Without Mars ‘Biological Imperative’ we have none of the other drives symbolised by Sun, Jupiter and Uranus. Mars as Nergal son of Enlil, marked the summer solstice the longest day, the drive for one more breath and one more hour on Earth. As Nergal it is also associated with the underworld, Mars knows that is where we will all end when our fight with nature and the material world has finished. Mars may be the God of the summer solstice and the noon sun but he is also king of the sunset and ruled the underworld with Ereshkigal. Mars marks the point where our own consciousness can burn us or harm us as well as the point where it sets forever. Mars instincts have been honed by evolution, to question or deny them response because your consciousness desires to be more than a biological organism is to see your DNA destroyed by the sun’s rays and to face the final sunset. We cannot overcome our Mars other than by death. By our nature we usually will ourselves to be more than our Mars, it is the nature of consciousness for Mars does not contain the desire for meaning, ethics and morals that comes with consciousness. Mars is solely our survival instinct ‘The biological imperative’. Yet Mars and Venus are the planets closest to Earth to us, and as such they symbolically fill up most of our time. For they are meant to come first, without them we have no life to find meaning within.
This brings us to the myth of self actualisation through enslavement of others. I DO NOT need to feed or clothe you, that is your Mars duty not mine. Whether you call yourself an academic, starseed, purple passion crystal diamond or anything else. You are not owed a mythological self actualisation in fact you are not owed anything by me, the universe or society. No actually you are not more special than any other human on the planet. We all have a sun and it may want to spend all of its time on finding its meaning but we are not responsible for anybody else’s Mars. Disown your own Mars and starve if you must but do not presume any other person responsible for your starvation but yourself. For there are many in this world who do not have a choice when it comes to starvation.
That being said all of us are not owed a healthy body or a healthy and happy old age. If we want to have those things we need to pay for them. We need to pay by ensuring the people that will look after us are treated decently, for they don’t owe us care and compassion especially if we have shown them none. If we don’t want to live in a world where we get a pillow put over our face the moment we become sick or frail and our bank accounts emptied then we must show them the compassion that we expect back from them. For none of us were ever entitled NOT to be killed by the peasant, or owed a compassion that was not given.
Sun in Cancer is very much aware of Mars drives and instincts and their impact on our lives. Mars is said to be in detriment in this sign but that is because Mars paternal and maternal instincts for survival of the species are not attributed to him by many astrologers and Cancer’s representation of all environments including the battlefield as well as the womb is rarely understood. Sun in Cancer Mars in Cancer, Libra, Capricorn or Aries people have a very dynamic relationship to their Mars. Sun in Cancer Mars in Taurus, Virgo, Scorpio and Pisces have a more harmonious and balanced relationship to their Mars sign. Those with Sun in Cancer Mars in Gemini, Leo, Sagittarius and Aquarius often have more difficulties recognising and responding to their Mars drives.
When Mars instincts are blocked this can be expressed negatively through Venus hedonistic attributes.
“Don’t wait for the last judgement. It takes place every day.” – Camus ‘The Fall’
Jupiter represents the drive to take risks and gamble. It drives us to explore the unknown and to create our own ethical belief system based on our own experiences. It drives us to find God or the sacred through our interaction with the environment and others. It drives us to live to the fullest as part of a group, society or a whole. It is the drive to be a part of something larger than the self, part of the whole and find meaning from that experience. We may do this in many ways whether that is a religion, a cause, a football or sports team, political movement or alternative lifestyle choices. Jupiter drives us to find sacred meaning from our social experiences. Whether we are worshipping a sports team or God it is the social aspect of sharing the sacred moment, euphoria and ritual, whether that is the Eucharist or a goal.
This aspect of our consciousness has a dangerous side to it the shared ritual and euphoria can lead people to treat others differently. Others can be anybody outside the group: non vegans, other football supporters, other religions, other political ideologies, other genders, other sexual preferences, other sexual conduct or anything that can differentiate us. People into S & M use vanilla as a derogatory term to describe anybody outside their group. The dangers of groupthink and shared ritual are seen in both the Nazis and KKK where shared ritual euphoria is used to promote more hate of those outside the group and encourage unethical behaviour. Hatred is not on grounds of colour or race as many believe but hatred is of everybody that does not conform to their ideology. However it is not something that can or should be dismissed those who heard Martin Luther King give his ‘I have A Dream’ speech also experienced this shared euphoria of the ‘we’. It is there when people gather to protest, to demonstrate and to change the world. It is part of what it means to have a moon, a ‘we’ and a community.
“Faith is the knowledge of the meaning of human life, the consequences of which is that man does not kill himself but lives. Faith is the force of life. If a man lives then he must believe in something…. without faith it is impossible to live.” – Leo Tolstoy ‘A Confession’
We must have faith and hope to live, that faith, hope and belief has to be towards an ideal and not ourselves. We cannot save the world because it has never needed saving by us. What we can do instead is try to live by our ideals and fail. We will fail everyday to live up to those ideals but in doing so we will learn who we are and why we fail. In understanding our own failings we understand those of others. We fail because we are Mars, the natural man and because we are Mars we can never be Jupiter our ideal of man and humanity. The natural man is always the enemy of Jupiter or God, for he is destined to fail, to be always in the sin of being human and not ideal. Our Jupiter must learn to give and accept grace for both ourselves and others. For the natural man stands naked and is vulnerable in his imperfectness.
We need to fail to remain human, when we refuse to see our failure we become elect and superior to others. For those unfamiliar with Scottish Calvinist presbyterianism elect means predetermined or selected before birth to ascend to heaven. The elect commit genocide and murder for the greater good. If you think you are a better person because you like Sanders and not Trump you are elect. In that moment it is always the Trump supporter that is the problem that needs to be cured. Cured by beatings or death. Cured to stop the Trump supporter from raping me because the Trump supporter is vermin not human. Think those words over the top they are the words of a Christian Anarchist to another Christian Anarchist, me. In writing this I commit the same sin. For I am by nature the Tax collector, the tax collector knows he has failed the ideal and knows he will continue to fail it. In past discussions in this group it is I that fail to believe I would of my own accord uphold its ideals. It is I in past discussions who fail to see how I could uphold pacifism in all circumstances. The others have been sure they would. In this surety they made themselves pharisees and scribes. it is because I know I fail to live up to pacifism in its fullest form that I know bashing somebody over the head would completely annihilate the ideal. When we see ourselves as complying with the ideal or fulfilling it, then the ideal of pacifism includes bashing people’s brains in because you don’t like them. The ideal is then always our behaviour and that ideal is discarded along the way. I commit the same sin because I am seeing how they failed the ideal. They never fail the ideal it is always I that fails an ideal and nobody else.
Christian Anarchism is based on pacifism but when you start to worship the possession of that ideal as making ‘we’ special the ‘we’ elect and not the ideal it goes. You become self righteous and all self righteous people have hierarchy, they raise themselves above others. Christian Anarchism foundations lie in Tolstoy a man who frequented brothels from his teenage years caught venereal diseases and was a gambling addict that lost his home.
Being a moral failure makes you compassionate, being self righteous makes you blind to the beam in your own eye. In ‘Anna Karenina’ Lev is Tolstoy and he has a personal message for his wife, for all ‘Anna Karenina’s’ faults she does not seduce Lev and Lev knows how easily he is seduced. He is not seduced because of Anna Karenina’s moral superiority and his wife should be grateful that the woman she looks down upon is morally superior to him her husband. For if she were not it would be their marriage in disarray.
“What’s done we partly may compute, but know not what’s resisted” – Robert Burns
We cannot make ourselves elect that is the story of ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’. For those struggling with the meaning of elect it is part of Calvinism, the elect are chosen to enter heaven before birth whatever their actions are in life. The elect are damned, they have put themselves beyond the consequences of their actions, beyond the consequences of their beliefs. The 99 ‘saved’ sheep had made themselves elect or saved and because of this they were beyond the consequences of their thoughts and actions. Because of this the one sheep is the only one Jesus could reach, the only one not to put himself or herself beyond their ideals, the only one to recognise those ideals were always failed. When we reject what has failed within us as ever being a part of ourselves we create our own Mr Hyde, the monster has always been our true face hidden from ourselves. To cut ourselves off from our Mr Hyde is always to give him permission to act without consequence.
Nature recycles everything stardust, comets mud and shit and we are all made of both the amazing and the disgusting. We can’t get rid of the mud and shit without stopping flowers from blooming without destroying life itself. We cannot have the ideal without destroying what is beautiful and life. Our ideals are what we aim for not what we achieve, our ideals would destroy the planet not save it. We have no ideals that can save anything but ourselves from ourselves. We save ourselves by failing our ideals and letting flowers grow, by taking death’s sting away and making it powerless. We save ourselves by facing death before we forsake our ideals, the ideals we have constantly failed.
The Place where we are Right
From the place we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.
The place we are Right
Is hard and trampled
Like a Yard.
But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House Once stood. – Yehuda Amichai
We choose the freedom of death or we choose to prioritize loved ones but it is always for us that we do it and for whatever meaning we find greatest, we cannot die for another because we cannot save another only ourselves. In the end we shall still be made of as much mud and shit as comets and stardust. We will only have decided what meaning we gave to all of it and whether we grew flowers or Mr Hyde. This is highlighted in the beginning of Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’ when Lev a.k.a know as Tolstoy tries to introduce communist principles to his farm to save the peasants from their extreme poverty and the peasants continue to do their own thing much to his frustration. This is because it is not about saving the peasant but saving Tolstoy from the consequences of being born with privileges, Tolstoy wants to fix his unfair advantage in society and save himself. The book ends with Lev becoming Christian or recognising that the desire is to save himself.
“She had always tried to face towards the light. But the harder you stared into the brightness the harsher it burned you until, at last, the temptation picked you up and bid you turn around and see how long, rich, strong and dark, streaming away behind you, your shadow had become” – terry Pratchett ‘Carpe Jugulum’
Jupiter represents our drive to express and develop our belief systems and values. Whether that is religious, academic or sports. It is also the drive to gamble and take risks in life to gain the most from our experiences. Jupiter is the instinct to play and be naturally curious about our environment. When children play they develop their own set of rules and ethics as a group agreement. In this way Jupiter represent ethics and religion as group agreements that we develop together. Jupiter drives us to be part of a social group, to take risks together, to form our own rules and meaning from life as an adventure in which we all die irrespective of status or achievement. It is the drive to enjoy ourselves whilst we are still alive: eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we shall die.
Jupiter along with Uranus represent the sacred masculine aspect of the personality. Both represent two different types of sky god the impersonal and the personal. Uranus as the heavens is responsible for the revolution of the heavens that mark the seasons and the passing of time as does the wisdom symbolised in understanding both time and position on the Earth using the position of stars in the sky. Jupiter represents a personal god one who takes an active interest in humanity and ethics, he is the sky god we can have a relationship with, who has faults and flaws and thus compassion for our own faults and flaws. Jupiter also symbolises symbols or the ability as conscious beings to find abstract meanings in objects and markings, such as cloud formations. Jupiter rules writing the ability to see ideas in different shapes scratched on a surface and to attach great meaning to them.
Although Uranus represents the Unknowable sky god he also represents revolution and revolutionary events because he is the sky god of the equinox or more precisely the sky god of of the celestial equator. The god of new astrological ages, events that are important to us for revolution is the discovery of unknown aspects of ourselves. Or put simply before electronic we didn’t know we didn’t know about them, nobody in the middle ages was wishing they knew more about nuclear power – they didn’t now they didn’t know. Rituals of the sacred masculine often involve interaction with nature such as camping in the wilderness. Although they often have elements of Mars survival instincts it is usually a means to learn to take appropriate risks and gamble. By doing so we learn our own ethical meaning of being in the world and interacting with it. We learn what it is to be part of humanity and interdependent on each other as well as the planet. This is also part of developing independence and new skills as well as being a revolutionary experience in life where we gain new insights into who we are.
Jesus descent into the wilderness is a sacred masculine event. Pascal’s night of fire where he discovers the god of Abraham and Isaac is not the god of philosophers but an unknown and unknowable god is a Uranus moment as much as his pressure laws are for he discovered some unknown unknowns, and Uranus represents the flash of divine inspiration that reveals unknown unknowns to us and reminds us that the divine always remains an unknown. Uranus as the impersonal god is unknown and unknowable, Jupiter as the personal god is like a Jesus figure we can relate to personally as part of who we are. That does not mean Uranus is not part of who we are it means that Uranus represents the part of us that is unknown and unknowable.
Saint Augustine argued that Jesus needs to be fully human, capable of having sex and just as tempted by ‘sin’ as the rest of us to be virtuous. Jesus needs to have these Jupiter attributes in order for him to overcome them, there is no virtue in celibacy unless we can have sex. For it is not the abstinence that is virtuous but the choosing of it for a higher purpose. There is no virtue in priests being abstinent because of catholic dogma, there is only virtue in priests being abstinent in order to devote more time and energy to their particular calling.
Sun in Cancer knows the relationship between their, family, community and Jupiter well. On the plus side they tend not to have the annoying evangelical behaviour of born again Christians, born again Atheists and others because of this. What they struggle with is understanding we can only fight for our own freedom, we cannot fight for others. For it is not the others interest we ever fight for but our own. We fight to make the world a better place for our own ideals not for others, we superimpose those ideals onto others in an attempt to force them to adopt our ideal. This is especially true when Jupiter is in Cancer, Capricorn, Aries or Libra. Sun in Cancer, Jupiter in Scorpio or Pisces tend to accept this darker side of themselves much easier whilst Jupiter in Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius or Aquarius will tend to disown this aspect of themselves.
When Jupiter expression is blocked it can be expressed negatively in Neptune attributes such as alcohol and substance abuse to block out realities of a situation without hope, adventure and meaning.
“Knowing you are going to die is, I suspect the beginning of wisdom.” – Terry Pratchett
Uranus represents our drive for individuality, originality, intellectual creativity, inventiveness and the process of developing wisdom. Uranus represents the drive to develop skills and knowledge throughout life. As children we learn to dress and feed ourselves, then we learn to go certain distances outside without adult supervision. throughout life this development goes hand in hand with Uranus opposite feminine planet Pluto, which governs emotional development and maturity. Uranus represents the unknowable and unknown sky god, this is also part of our own consciousness that is unknown and unknowable to us. However because Uranus is unknown and unknowable to us it is represented by sudden, shocking and surprising events or behaviours we display. The more of these events we encounter the more we gain wisdom into what it is to be human in all its frailty.
“Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do. If you put a large switch somewhere, with a sign on it saying, ‘End-of-the-World switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH’, the paint wouldn’t even have time to dry.” – Terry Pratchett
Uranus is the moment in which we do the things we claimed we would never do, the thing we have sat in judgement of others for. The impersonal sky god that reminds us never to judge lest ye be judged. Because Uranus is generational in signs, this judgement is also a generational one and if you think your generation will be different it will not make the same mistakes as past generations you are right. It will make its own mistakes and these are unknown and unknowable, but you will be judged on them in the same way you have judged past generations and you will be found wanting. More importantly Uranus drives us to the place where we are unknown and unknowable, where we have no answers, where we have no truths to give, not rightness to argue over or kill for. In this place we can find the unknown and unknowable God in whichever form we chose to find him. This is the place of the crucifixion, where our Jupiter dies. The father did not forsake Jesus his Jupiter died. When Jupiter dies his arrogance dies with him and he is resurrected anew. A Jupiter that does not hold any answers but seeks them. A Jupiter that knows it is not the ideal but senses that the ideal has been failed. That the failed ideal always requires the crucifixion, rebirth.
Uranus is the place where God as Jupiter has died, the place where no inherent rightness is found. The place where we are brought down low. It is the place of infinite emptiness, the point beyond the pole star the mythological point of nothingness from which the universe sprung.
“I am asking about the relation to the deity, of all the different beliefs of mankind. I am asking about the general revelation of God to the whole universe with all those cloudy nebulae. What am I doing? To me personally, to my heart, has been indubitably revealed a knowledge unattainable by reasoning, and I obstinately wish to express this knowledge by reason and by words.
Do I not know that it is not the stars that are moving? But I watching the movement of the stars, cannot picture to myself the rotation of the earth and I am right in saying the stars move.” – Leo Tolstoy ‘Anna Karenina’
Uranus also represents sudden events in life, in which we have not reached a stage in development or the emotional maturity skills to cope or understand. This can be events such as abandonment by a parent or their early death or it may be in the form of abuse. These events can create blocks in our development until we reach an age or maturity in which we learn to cope and deal with them or we seek help in doing so. These blocks are part of Uranus which symbolises power developed from castration or frustration. If we are blocked from progressing in life our frustrations build up until we reach explosion point – Uranus represents this explosive drive to clear whatever is in our path of development as humans and as humanity as a whole. Uranus as the sky god represents the explosion and power of the ‘Big Bang’ – an event of immense power from which the universe is created. Uranus being generational through the signs represents each new generation’s frustration and castration by the previous generation and the explosive drive for change. From a personal point Uranus can have the same effects in our lives and mark periods of rapid expansion and the removal of obstacles in our lives.
Uranus can also represent self castration. For example a child that was abused or neglected may choose not to have children of their own as an adult. Decide not to face the unknown unknowables that they possess. They decide not to face the judgement of their children that they passed onto their parents. In doing so they lose an opportunity to understand that even when we do not abuse or neglect parenting is extremely hard and we make mistakes. They never understand the pressure all parents are under. This by no means excuse abuse or neglect, but it is an understanding of what it is to be human and to fail. We are always castrating ourselves through fear of our unknown, whether that is the fear to test our skills and talents or an unknown and unknowable future.
The greatest castration is always from fear of an unknown inner evil, Mr Hyde is hidden within all of us and always remains an unknown unknown unless we spiral into the abyss of our own depravity. We may catch glimpses of him in our dreams, Neptune the known unknowable god who is vaguely seen but never understood, felt but never explained, the unsolvable mystery of existence and consciousness.
“Man is but a reed, the most frail thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A mist or a drop of water is sufficient to kill him. But should the universe crush him, man would still be more noble than what kills him, because man knows that he dies; but the universe has no knowledge of the advantage it has over him” – Blaise Pascal
Uranus is the unknown and unknowable God. By nature it is undefinable not he or she, black or white. When we say I don’t believe in that God we are really saying I don’t believe in that Religious outlook for God always remains a mystery to ourselves, one we don’t know that we don’t know about. Christian or atheist we use God to substitute our religious outlook. God is not our Religious outlook. When I say I don’t believe in a God that punishes with heaven or hell, I really mean that is not my religious outlook. Our religious outlook is governed by Jupiter and it is personal to us, we all know our own outlook. What God / Gods is/are or isn’t/aren’t we never know, only our religious outlook on them. Astrology is the presentation of religious outlooks on Gods represented or symbolised by planets, constellations and stars. Rather it contains within its many forms the development of religious outlooks and their increasing complexity and depth throughout the ages. Symbolic connections between the different aspects of who we are and what meaning we can find in our lives. Uranus symbolically rules astrology, for it stands above the complexity of our belief systems and represents the unknown and unknowable truth of God/Gods or the divine. The truth beyond everybody’s subjective truth that cannot be reached. We have faith or belief because Uranus cannot be obtained, by any of us. To claim to know Uranus is to lie, Uranus is what none of us can ever know.
Uranus also represents the psychic, the psychic has an unknown and unknowable access to something that in itself remains unknown and unknowable. The psychic never knows what they have access to, only that they have some access and even their access remains unknown and unknowable. They only know that at times they have this access and they sense there are rules to it and that an unknowable something, somebody or somebodies controls their access and has set out the rules. The psychic is no different to anybody else that gets a flash of inspiration except the flash is not of inspiration it is of the future. Yet it is fundamentally the same we cannot control flashes of inspiration, deliberately determine them just accept they happen, come from an unknown source of which we have no control. We sense rules but psychics do not know them or understand them all. What most will tell you is the simple not in our own interest rule. Psychics can’t tell you anything for money, any more than they can impress those they are sexually attracted to with their abilities. Not only can they not impress those they are sexually attracted to but they are unlikely to be able to see or sense anything around these people unless they are in an established relationship with them. Psychics never know if the people they like also return the feelings. Psychics must take that Jupiter gamble and have their Mars stand naked to be judged along with the rest of humanity. Uranus has to remain an unknown and unknowable for psychics, astrologers and Mediums as it is for the rest of humanity.
Sun in cancer struggles to understand Uranus and that is fine because nobody understands Uranus. Sun in Cancer Uranus in Cancer, Libra, Aries or Capricorn struggle to cope with the impact of Uranus the most but they are also the most likely to have divine flashes of inspiration from nowhere. Sun in cancer Uranus in Taurus, Virgo, Scorpio or Pisces cope best, sun in Cancer Uranus in Gemini, Leo, Sagittarius or Capricorn struggle with recognising its impact and resolving those issues it highlights.
‘Take the money, Watch it burn, Sink in the river, The lessons I’ve learned’.
The feminine planets are: moon, Venus, Neptune and Pluto
the moon rules Cancer and thus those with Sun in Cancer relate to the moon well even if they don’t like the effects it has on their moods. Those with moon in Aries, Cancer, Libra or Capricorn will find the mood swing most difficult. Sun in Cancer moon in Taurus, Virgo, scorpio and Pisces tend to cope much better with mood swing whilst those with moon in Gemini, Leo, Sagittarius and Aquarius tend not to recognise this aspect of their personality.
when the moon’s expression is blocked it tends to be expressed as the negative attributes of the sun, attention seeking, grandiose behaviour and narcissism.
Venus represents our emotional expression through art, music, cooking, gardening and sex. It represents the expression of our hedonism, passions and loves in life. Venus represents the ability to express our nurturing, eroticism and romantic emotions through the above mediums. Venus allows us to relate to each others emotional expressions and to express ourselves, physically, creatively and intellectually. Venus is how we develop meaning in our personal relationships to each other. Venus also represents our primal emotional needs such as security, comfort warmth, physical contact and care. As babies we are born with primal emotional needs and Venus rules their expression, these are just as important than our primitive survival instincts, and we cannot thrive and develop psychologically stable relationships without them being fulfilled in some way.
Venus also represents imperialism, the ability to feed our hedonism by usurping another’s resources. in this form she is the goddess of war, she wants what you have and she is willing to kill for it. The ‘star’ of love is also the star of greed and selfishness. Venus also represents where we are most easily corrupted or bribed into silence, our guilty pleasures.
Venus usurped the sky god Anu/Uranus to become queen of heaven and she still rules the equinox and astrological ages. all revolutions are filtered through venus our hedonism, greed and selfishness are permanent aspects of society whatever revolution occurs. Venus represents our personal desires: the good, the bad, the selfless, the selfish and the hidden and by these an impersonal god was always going to be usurped.
Venus is the morning star the name of both Jesus and Satan. Venus as Inanna is not just the planet Venus but includes the pole star. In the Age of Taurus the pole star was Thuban in Draco (the Tiamat) which is why Venus is exalted in Pisces but does not rule it. 500BC to 500AD there were twin pole stars. This twin mythology is reflected in Christianity. Satan as the twin that fell Thuban and later the dim twin star Pherkad, Jesus as the twin that rose. Jesus calls himself the bright morning star that is Kochab, the brightest of the twin pole stars. Satan falls because he does something he considers wrong, that is all sin is. Jesus rises because he takes a leap of faith and does what he thinks is right irrespective of consequence. This duality is found in Lucifer and Hesperus the Roman names for the dual Gods of Venus.
Venus is represented by the cross, that is the celestial equator which marks the equinox and the Earth’s axial tilt on which the pole star sits at its northern end. Jesus the human can only ascend to the pole star by dying on her cross. In becoming the pole star he becomes God. Venus is the cross on which we all sit, do we fall by our temptations or do we rise by our love. All of us do both and as Saint Augustine stated it is mainly luck whether we are risen or fallen at the moment of our death. That is why it is foolish to pass judgement on another for they may be the risen one when they die and we may be the fallen.
This duality continues in Jesus representing all that are fallen: the homeless, jailed, sick, disabled, poor, unwanted, the abandoned and the excluded. In him they become risen and it is those that would look down upon them that are the fallen. “For he who is least among you all is the one that is great.”
Venus is the judge, which Mars has to stand before the power we have to make another fallen, for not meeting our expectations or desires. It is also the power to elevate to say that I see you naked with all your faults and I find you worthy of love, of my love. To say that you are worthy and desirable even with all your faults and flaws on display for they make you beautiful to behold in my eye.
Venus and Mars are the closest planets to Earth and it is these symbols and their meanings which are the largest themes of our lives. Venus is hedonism and pleasure, and right now we are going to talk about a subject that may be controversial to some euthanasia. When people are incapable of experiencing hedonism or pleasure, when all they are capable of experiencing is pain even that most basic of drives ‘The biological Imperative’ is overruled and they wish to die. That is their right for to lose our Venus expression is to lose our humanity.
The sun in Cancer understands Venus well, and the many moods they may have reflect her many faces. Venus is a complex mix of emotions just like them. sun in Cancer venus in Aries, Cancer, Libra or Capricorn have a dynamic expression of their needs and are more openly direct. Venus in Taurus, Virgo, Scorpio or Pisces tend to be more relaxed. Venus in gemini, Leo, Sagittarius and Aquarius is more likely to feel baffled by the contradictory desires and emotions they feel.
When venus expression is blocked it is likely to be expressed in negative Mars attributes such as violence and sexual aggression. Or in the ultimate taking of one’s own life.
Neptune represents the emotional expression and relationship we have with our ideals, dreams, illusions and disillusionment especially our spiritual and religious expression of themes. It represents the realms of inner emotional experience and how we internalise events into meaningful emotional experiences. it also represent the illusionment and disillusionment found within these emotional interpretations, as a child we may emotionally interpret a parent leaving as them no longer loving us. When we fall in love we fall under its magical illusion, only to be disillusioned by the person later. with Pluto Neptune also makes up what is called the sacred feminine. this is an aspect that applies to all humans irrespective of their gender, sexuality or sexual orientation. This is about the development of emotional maturity and preparedness for death by developing our own inner meaning to our life and what we have accomplished.
“You must believe in magic or nothing magical will ever happen to you.” – David McMillan
Neptune is associated with GABA in our brains, GABA receptor stimulation makes us fall asleep, become more relaxed they also help relieve pain. We don’t just produce oxytocin when we fall in love we stimulate GABA production, alcohol does the same. Chamomile, Lavender, hops and chloroform stimulate GABA or GABA receptors which is why they are all associated with sleeping. GABA is complex and we should avoid using any GABA products long term because they throw the body out of balance. It is better to get your body to produce more GABA and yoga does this.
Neptune is also associated with Melatonin. To increase melatonin all we need is the dark or dim lighting. Melatonin does not just make us sleep but also regulates blood pressure, protects us from natural radiation and is an anti inflammatory.
Neptune symbolises our aliefs and beliefs. An alief is when we act in a way that suggests we believe something. For example if you are scared of bridges you may act in a way that suggests you believe it is going to fall however if you really believed a bridge was going to collapse you would not go on it. Aliefs and beliefs are powerful emotional responses that can block our development due to fear.
Neptune and Jupiter rule magical thinking such as Dumbo having a magical feather that makes him fly. We often have lucky coins, pants and other such items as a natural expression of this attribute or lucky behaviours such as touching wood. We also have the opposite things and events that bring us bad luck such as walking under a ladder or breaking a mirror. Magical thinking is important in events when we come close to severe injury. For example surviving a natural disaster, believing we are chosen not to die because of a yet unfulfilled purpose may make us more focused on helping others. It also gives us a feeling of control in situations where we have little.
Magical thinking also gives us the placebo effect, which is important in many chronic conditions where there are no cures. The placebo effect makes a difference to those lives, no matter how small that effect is. However it also makes us more vulnerable people believe that the same paracetamol that costs £15 has a greater effect than the paracetamol that costs 5p. We believe the £200 face cream must be better than the £1 cream. When we say you only get what you pay for quite often all we are paying for is the placebo effect. We believe that an injection is better than a pill and that an operation is better than an injection. This means paracetamol is always less effective, we can buy it cheaply across a counter and we don’t need a surgeon to insert it in us.
Neptune in Sumerian mythology is the Nammu or the Tiamat, the great sea dragon. She rules the celestial sea of the Northern hemisphere in which the stars sail across the sky at night. During the Age of Taurus Thuban of the constellation Draco the dragon was the pole star. The point of celestial North, the point of the northern rotational axis of the Earth. It appears as though the heavens revolve around this point and the stars here stay always in the night sky they are the eternal ones, this point is an eternal point of origin in mythology. Neptune rules the night and the sea, our mythological origins and our eternal being. Neptune represents the setting sun, the dissolving of consciousness the place where we become dreamers and mystics. Yet Thuban lady rib or lady life of the Tiamat also represents the central themes of being alive and being conscious.
This because Neptune symbolises the central aspects of what is meaningful and sacred to us. In ‘Les Miserables’ the first book is Victor Hugo’s ideal of the perfect Christian. The bishop gives his house to the sick since it is bigger than the ‘Hospital’ and moves in there instead. he gives his money to the poor and wears his cassocks until they have holes. However he has enough faults and flaws to remain human and likeable. We see this best when he goes to give last rites to a dying revolutionary. He talks about how evil it was to kill the king’s children, and the revolutionary talks about how evil it was that thousands of children should starve or be killed for taking food at the hands of the king. The revolutionary reminds him that the king had no qualms about taking the lives of their children for his splendor. He leaves with a less judgemental and more balanced view of the man. The Bishop keeps his silver because it would upset his sister too much to get rid of it although it constantly preys on his conscience. When Jean Valjean steals his silver he helps him on condition that Valjean help the poorest and most vulnerable in society, in this way he does what he wanted all along and uses it to help the poor, but he does it in a way that means he does not have to face the consequences of his actions in the form of his sister’s anger. However in his actions the bishop leaves his sister destitute in the event of his death and he does so in a dishonest manner that is never dealt with by Hugo. With Mars attributes you have a direct this is what I want and damn the consequences, attitude with Neptune the action is often indirect and in ways that are meant to stop us facing the consequences of our actions. Consequences of actions are ruled by Saturn and this planet’s attributes are hard, but vital for humanity to grasp for Saturn represents our physical frailties as living organisms. Neptune is soft like mist, and it like Jupiter does not like facing Saturn attributes.
In the second book we meet Hugo’s ideal of motherhood ‘Fantine’. Fantine is the innocent in a group of three couples and unlike the rest she is in love. Fantine has no memory of her own parents having grown up on the streets and looking after herself for as long as she can remember. For the other couples it is just a game where the women are there just to profit as much as possible in the short time before they are abandoned. When fantine is abandoned she is shocked and in disbelief. When she finds out she is pregnant she believes he will return and love both her and their child. Instead Fantine is forced to find a place for her child while she works to provide for her. She takes the fancy ribbons from her hair and puts them on her daughter because they were a gift from her father and because she wants her daughter to be beautiful and have the things that she never had. When Fantine loses her Job she sells the gold that is her hair and the pearls that are her teeth. In resorting finally to prostitution she sells the rest of her body to feed her child. fantine is the ideal of the loving mother who sacrifices everything to feed their child putting their own needs last. However everything fantine sacrifices is in vain because her daughter’s carers spend it on themselves and use her child as a slave.
“I dreamed a dream in times gone by, When hope was high and life worth living, I dreamed that love would never die, I dreamed that God would be forgiving, Then I was young and unafraid, And dreams were made and used and wasted, There was no ransom to be paid, No song unsung, No wine untasted, But the tigers come at night, With their voices soft as thunder, As they tear your hope apart, As they turn your dream to shame” – ‘Les Miserables’ musical, ‘I Dreamed a Dream’
Fantine’s child does not gain by Fantine’s idealism, because Fantine’s idealism does not take reality into account or the consequences of our actions. Fantine’s idealism in the end kills her and enslaves her child. Fantine has too much Neptune attributes that are not being balanced by her Saturn attributes. This is balanced by Jean Valjean who begins as a character by having all Saturn and Mars survival attributes but no Neptunian meaning within his life. However this changes after meeting the Bishop and Fantine, the idealism and trust in both these moments, make them sacred events in his life which gives it new meaning. These moments change his life forever as he adopts those ideals and battles his failures of the past. Jean Valjean accepts responsibility for Cossette because he accepts responsibility for her mother’s death.
“Come with me, Where chains will never bind you, All your grief at last, At last behind you, Lord in Heaven look down on him with mercy, Take my hand and lead me to salvation, Take my love, For love is everlasting, And remember the truth that once was spoken, To love another person is to see the face of God” – ‘Epilogue’ Fantine’s lyrics from ‘Les Miserable’
Hugo, dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Dickens to some extent see the poor, the peasant (Aries) as the embodiment of true Christianity. They fulfil the ideology of giving and sharing although they have the least to give and share in society. This is part of the reason why these books are popular they contain the sacred that cannot be reached through reason. We cannot gloss over this aspect as being the opiate of the masses as Marx said. This is true of a shallow spiritual religious expression where Aries gets its due in the next world and the oppressors face their ‘Karma’. This was part of the age of Pisces attempt at the unresolved issue of Aries peasant assuming the throne.
“They make the laws, To chain us well, Dazzle us with heaven, Or they damn us into hell, We will not worship, The God they serve, the God of greed who feed the rich, While poor folk starve” – ‘World Turned Upside Down’ by Leon rosselson
It is not only our illusions and idealism that form the sacred but our disillusionment as well. The famous “Call me Ishmael’ from the start of ‘Moby Dick’, is saying the author identifies with Ishmael abandoned in the desert by Abraham (father of Judaism and Christianity) as God’s will. Captain Ahab like his biblical namesake (married to Jezebel) battles with God in the form of a whale. The whale took Ahab’s leg in much the same way that God can take a child or another loved one at any moment, in a sense Ahab is battling the God of dead children, natural disasters and misery. God in the book takes the form of a white whale with strange markings that are undecipherable, unknown and unknowable an impersonal God that is no respecter of persons. In a world created by our consciousness by finding meaning in things, the whale is just as undecipherable in meaning as the dead child is. There is no meaning for Ahab to find in the loss of his legs other than the battle with the whale. A battle that takes place at sea in the Tiamat, where there are no landmarks from which everything can be rationally mapped out. The sea represents what is unfathomable and unknown and yet sensed and seen. The last wild place where reason, science and civilization has yet to rule. The place of sirens, sea monsters and pirates. Here the sacred battle can wage on and meaning can be found in the lives of those that defy the sacred, challenge the sacred and defy the sacred. Ahab is forever the man battling God or the Whale.
This is a theme we see repeated in ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy which sees God finally killed in the last book. This writing is mistakenly described as atheist it is actually gnostic. If God does not exist he cannot be killed. In this belief modern satanists are more honest than many atheists for they seek to do battle with God and religion in the same way that Ahab did, finding meaning in their lives fighting a nativity scene, a christmas tree or crucifix. Atheists on the other hand are not meant to believe in the existence of God, thus should not find meaning in their lives battling him, his religions or Christmas decorations. They are not supposed to define and find meaning within their lives by their relationship to God and religion, that is not secular.
Gnostics overcame this dilemma by inventing the demiurge, the God they wanted to battle was the fake one and although they have an unknown and unknowable God that provides the odd moment of inspiration (Uranus), they find meaning through battling the fake God that kills kids, causes earthquakes and is the cause of their disillusionment with the physical world (Neptune). This was the acknowledgement that battling God is just as sacred and religious as worshipping God. Melville was battling the God that killed his father, the God that was unknowable because his father was dead. The God that left him without root and ritual. Melville creates his own ritual through the battle. He takes to the sea because he has no root to the land.
Neptune symbolises the space we call mystery, night, dream, sea, illusion and disillusionment. The space in which we can challenge Fantine’s unnecessary sacrifices or find the ideal and beauty in them, sometimes both. Neptune is the undefined space in which we find our own meanings and battles to fight in life.
“Do you hear the people sing, Lost in the Valley of the night, It is the music of a people who are climbing to the light, For the wretched of the Earth there is a flame that never dies, Even the darkest night will end, And the sun will rise” – ‘Les Miserable’ the musical.
Neptune rules the night and our dreams and it is then that the brain sorts through the day’s events and programmes itself anew to take into account all the new developments and it often does this process when we are dreaming. Dreaming is a necessary act that fills the void of sleep much like Neptune itself.
“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frighten me.” – Blaise Pascal
Neptune’s illusions and disillusionment fills in the infinite spaces that frighten us, what we fear more than disillusionment is the void that exists within us without it and our illusions. Neptune is how we deal with our own inner emptiness, our own lack of essential meaning. We imagine one, we create meaning in our dreams and because of this ability we can re-dream ourselves into whomever we become. We imagine a God to fight because it is better to be Ishmael and be abandoned by God than to be abandoned for no reason, just as it is better to fight a God that lets children die than to have them die for no reason. We can fight and punish a God that does those things, we can do nothing without him, except accept them.
Saint Augustine admits in ‘City of God’ to having sex in a church before he was converted to Christianity. Sex in church is the act of a believer, and he could not convert without having done so. Saint Augustine was obviously angry with God, sex in church is an expression of rage and defiance of God. I know because I had sex in every room of a manse, not with a man of the cloth but his son. It did the same thing gave me the ultimate expression of rage and anger at the loss of my grandfather, it was the last act in my war with God. In doing this I could admit I was not an Atheist, saying God doesn’t exist is like saying I don’t believe in fairies. It is an attempt to kill, but deep down believers know it is a glancing blow. Sex instinctively is the ultimate act of profanity and thus defiance against God. In doing this I was able to ‘convert’ back to Christianity.
Neptune is but it never exists and it cannot be expressed except through the other planets especially, Jupiter, Pluto and Uranus. Neptune is the aesthetic in religion but it cannot be without the religion, the aesthetic in nature but it cannot be without nature, the aesthetic is but it does not exist. Ideal is but does not exist, it is always what we strive towards, and it is created from our existence. We need a real mother before we can create an ideal mother, Neptune is created from Saturn and cannot be without it. Neptune is our reaction towards Saturn, reality and necessity which exist. Death is a necessity and reality of existence, Neptune is our reaction to it.
Sun in Cancer is more able to cope with Neptune attributes being a water sign. When Neptune is in Aries, Cancer, Libra or Capricorn this is a more dynamic influence in their lives, which requires them to learn the balance between idealism and futile sacrifice. When Neptune is in Taurus, Virgo, Scorpio or Pisces the influence is one that is much more harmonious. With Neptune in Gemini, Leo, Sagittarius or Aquarius they struggle more with understanding how their Neptune attributes affect their decisions and life.
When Neptune attributes are blocked it can express itself in negative Jupiter attributes such as self righteousness, over confidence, excessive risk taking and moral superiority complex.
Pluto represents the development of emotional maturity through loss, trauma and experiencing emotional pain. Pluto represents the heart of experience of all living organisms, which is necessarily birth,pain, struggle for survival, sickness, offspring, disease and death. These things are common to all living biological organisms. As we mature we face different emotional stage from being separated from our parents and learning they will return to watching a loved one becoming sick and dying. From becoming emotionally independent to accepting our own death throughout our lives we are constantly maturing emotionally. Each time we face death we develop better emotional skills to cope. However Pluto can also represent emotional trauma that can occur before we are ready to deal with them such as the loss of a parent at an early age or abuse of some sort. In these instance Pluto can block the full development of these other planets until the traumas are dealt with.
Pluto also represents the compulsion through which we can find meaning in our lives. Kierkegaard fell in love with Regine Olsen, he did not choose to fall in love with her it was a compulsion over which he had no control and perhaps because of this he ran away. He ran away because the compulsion to love another is risky the heart can be broken at anytime. However in accepting he would always be in love with her he find the eternal in his life – his love for her and that gives his life meaning. The moment he met her gave his life meaning and thus it becomes a fated moment the point his life was building up to, the point the rest of his life would revolve around.
“If all else perished and he remained. I should still continue to be; if all else remained and he were annihilated, the universe would become a mighty stranger.” Emily Bronte ‘Wuthering Heights’
In accepting this eternal Kierkegaard also had to accept the temporal, that she may not be in love with him, that she may die at any moment and that he may die at any moment.
“Oh! you said you cared nothing for my sufferings. And I pray one prayer – I repeat it until my tongue stiffens – Catherine Earnshaw may you not rest while I am living: You said I killed you haunt me then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on the earth. Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you. Oh God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” – Emily Bronte ‘Wuthering Heights’
In accepting with these things Kierkegaard lives with the compulsion of eternal love that brings meaning to his life but which can end at any moment because both he and she are temporal beings and it is only their love that is eternal. In doing so Kierkegaard embraces the happiness of love and the despair this compulsion brings.
“whatever our souls are made of mine and his are the same.” – ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Bronte
Note this is not the same thing as remaining in an abusive relationship because we ‘love’ somebody. In that sense there is no honesty and meaning found unless we recognise that although we love this person and that love is eternal we cannot remain with the person to be abused for that is denying the temporal truth of the situation. The truth is they are abusive and temporal here does not mean that they will change because they may well remain abusive until their death. We must embrace loving somebody we cannot live with or cannot have a relationship with, face the despair of loving somebody we cannot be with due to temporal circumstances. ‘Wuthering Heights’ is not about abusive relationships but an inversion of the oldest story that of the femme fatale.
The femme fatale has been told in many forms from sirens, Salome, Jezebel, Delilah, vampires, Mata Hari, Lilith and perhaps the oldest Ereshkigal. Ereshkigal is Inanna’s twin sister, ruler of the underworld – note in ancient Greek mythology there was a Persephone long before there was a Pluto.
Ereshkigal and Persephone are the dark goddess that rules over the fertility cycle one that is shared by women. Inanna is the fertility of the spring equinox and birth, her twin ereshkigal is the autumnal equinox and menopause the death or ending of the fertility cycle. In mythology Inanna is killed when she visits Ereshkigal in the underworld. Ereshkigal on killing Inanna assumes her fertility, this is the equivalent of giving a 70 year old woman IVF. Ereshkigal is in pain for what has happened to her is unnatural. Ereshkigal cannot birth a fertile land although she represents the sleeping soil that will. To save the Earth and Ereshkigal Inanna must be resurrected and her place is taken in the underworld by her husband Dumuzi.
Dumuzi spends 6 months in the underworld and 6 months with Inanna just as Persephone spends 6 months in the underworld and 6 months with Demeter. Except Dumuzid is replaced by his sister, which reflects the difference in growing seasons for different crops in the fertile crescent. Dumuzi represents grains, cereals and lambing season his sister represents grapes and fruits of the vine. However the principle is the same Ereshkigal is the infertile one, the barren one the woman who is sexual after her fertility has passed as is Lilith. Lilith and Lilittu are spirits who were not fertile in life, they are incapable of being fertile in death. These spirits haunt the dreams of young men in erotic dreams that cause them to shed sperm that cannot be fertile. The same is true of the female vampire the dead are not fertile, their sexuality leads to permanent death for the DNA cannot be passed on to future generations. In a world without pensions, care homes and welfare state it is our future generation that we rely on as we become elderly. Lilith represents starving to death in our old age, working until we drop.
Black moon Lilith is the point in the chart where the moon is furthest away from the Earth. The point where being a mother or having a mother or family is furthest from us, the point where we are most distant from the ‘we’ the point where we are solely dependent on the’ I’ in our old age, sickness or disability. It’s opposite the point where the moon is closest to the Earth is Priapus an erect penis. Lilith is not the feminist mistake, it matters not whether she lies beneath or astride adam she is infertile. Lilith is incapable of being Eve mother of all, she is the dark desire that separates us from the ‘we’ that leaves us shunned and excluded from society, from nurturing and from its care. Lilith is a sexuality that cannot bring or sustain life and that is its darkness. Pluto the planet furthest from our solar system’s own Goldilock zone (capable of sustaining life) is similar. Pluto is the bringer of death because he cannot bring life.
This is what makes Kierkegaard the grandfather of existentialism and Emily Bronte the grandmother. For in choosing our own unique Pluto or Lilith we are being true to ourselves. In ‘Wuthering Heights’ Cathy is torn between Linton the social norm, the ‘we’, nurturing, food and shelter and Heathcliff her soul, destruction, deprivation and social exclusion. Linton is nice and easy the comfortable life. Heathcliff is despair and torment. In the despair and torment we find meaning because we choose beyond our comfort beyond the ‘we’ that we have defied.
This compulsion is not only about love. Gandhi and Martin Luther King did not choose to act but were compelled. Gandhi was on a train in South Africa whilst Martin Luther King was on a bus in USA, both were faced with situations in which they felt compelled to act, compelled to stand in front of another. Both felt the compulsion to defy the exclusion as part of ‘social norms’ of the ‘we’ in those societies. The compulsion is also a calling, it is the eternal moment from which all of our life can gain meaning. The life itself is temporal but the moment is eternal, Gandhi and Martin Luther King are eternally freedom fighters driven by a compulsion that leads them to jail and even death itself. Their Linton was the life of a respectable lawyer and the life of a respectable baptist minister. Now they are eternally freedom fighters just as Dante is forever the lover of Beatrice as Kierkegaard is eternally the lover of Regine.
The compulsion that made Dante spiral into the abyss of the Inferno is also the compulsion that makes him ascend into paradiso guided by Beatrice. It is on the seventh level of purgatory, lust that Beatrice guides him, afraid to pass through the flames of this level the angel of chastity reminds him that only by passing through this level will he find Beatrice on the other side.
“From that most holy wave I now returned
To Beatrice; remade, as new trees are
Renewed when they bring forth new boughs, I was
Pure and prepared to climb unto the stars” Dante ‘Purgatorio’
Pluto is not the religion bought at a new age shop for 5 cents, it is not the religion that fits in with your lifestyle and hipster friends, Pluto is not ‘true for me, because it works for me’. Pluto is the opposite compulsion, ‘true for me, because it is the idea and ideals that I am compelled to work for, compulsed to sacrifice my lifestyle and friends for’, Pluto never works for us we work for him, we sacrifice our all and we do not need any rewards for doing so. Pluto is not the phoenix rising in the ashes, it is walking into the flame without any need to rise in the ashes, walking into the flame for a belief, an idea and ideals regardless of the consequences.
The idea of being submerged in darkness to grow and develop is one you can see in the like of Dostoyevsky. As a child of a doctor he witnessed as a teenager the horrific injuries of a 8 year old child raped by an adult man. He also saw the illnesses and diseases of the poorest in society. He saw his father’s neighbours accuse serfs of murdering his father so they would be cleared off the land. He himself was sent to Siberia and shackled until his release. he himself had a darkness within him in the form of antisemitism. it is after the darkness of losing a child that he questions his own ‘Philosophical Christianity’. The idea of agape love that does not require us to actually love is rebuked in ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ not by argument but by example. At the funeral of Ilyusha his schoolboy friends gather and Alyosha is compelled to promise to love them all forever and never forget them or this moment, all the boys join in. In this act they create an eternal moment that is sacred to all of them, they become the lovers of each other.
“Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind, should auld acquaintance be forgot for the sake of auld lang syne” – ‘Auld Lang Syne’ Robert Burns
Memories of the dead are sacred, they are the memories of when they were part of our ‘we’, and those who share those memories become sacred too for they are the only ones we can perform the ritual of remembering with, the remaining we. In the ritual of sharing memories we become each other’s lover. For lovers share memories that bond them together. It is the special memories we share that bonds us together as each other’s lover.
“Don Jose and donna Inez led, For sometime an unhappy sort of life, Wishing each other not divorced, but dead; They lived respectably as man and wife. Their conduct was exceedingly well bred, And gave no outwards signs of inner strife, Until at length the smother’d fire broke out, And put the business past all doubt.” – Lord Byron ‘Don Juan’
Lord Byron has a dark and infamous history. This poem was left unfinished by his death, the final exclusion from the ‘we’ but it is a reply to his critics the ‘we’ from which he had been excluded. it is a very funny poem due to his ability to expose the hypocrisy of the social group he lived in and was excluded from. this also meant it was unpopular at the time of writing although Byron was famous the first two cantos of the poem were published anonymously. The poem caused outrage and his published refused to publish any of the cantos.
The reason Byron was so penetrative of society was because he had a secret so dark in that society. He preferred others to know he had sex with his own half sister than to know he preferred men sexually. Byron lived at a time when being homosexual still carried a death penalty, incest however was a matter for the church and not the law. This darkness haunted Byron what he hid rather than die found ways of expressing itself. His relationship with the prostitute dressed as his brother was one example. However it is his wife’s accusation of sodomy that puts his life in danger. It is this that his half sister reacts to and not the accusations of incest. For this puts his life in danger and in turn drives him into exile.
“But passions most dissembles, yet betrays, Even by its darkness; as the blackest sky, Foretells the heaviest tempest, it displays, Its workings through the vainly guarded eye, And in whatever aspect it arrays, Itself’t is still the same hypocrisy; Coldness or Anger, even disdain or hate, Are masks it often wears, and still too late.” – ‘Don Juan’ Byron
The repressed sexual desires of Byron made him have an affinity to women of the time. women who wrote their darkest secret fantasies to him anonymously and those letters he kept in the thousands. Byron inspired Heathcliff, sex for procreation and prosperity had died a death in him, he was Dracula the vampire whose seed was dead.
“And here’s to you Mrs Robinson, Jesus loves you more than you will know, Wo, wo, wo” – Paul simon ‘Mrs robinson’
‘The Graduate’ is the story of the menopausal Lilith / Pluto, Mrs Robinson. She is trapped in a loveless marriage because of procreational sex, Elaine her daughter being the reason for her marriage. It is one thing to choose despair and suffering for ourselves another to choose it for a child because of our actions. Mrs Robinson chooses the societal norm she chooses to raise her child as part of the ‘we’. ‘The graduate’ is the retelling of Byron’s ‘don Juan’ where he is the innocent seduced by young women forced into marriage with old men. Except in this retelling they are forced into marriage because of lack of contraception.
‘The Age of innocence’ precedes ‘The Graduate’ it was written in 1920 but also has the same themes except it is Newland archer who has to forsake Ellen when his wife May becomes pregnant. Eve the mother of all represents life and the innocence of new life but it binds us and traps us to a future that is often not our free choosing. However in protecting the innocent we often have to slay our own vampire. Both ‘The Age of Innocence’ and ‘The Graduate’ represent the death of social ages, the first killed by the mass slaughter of WWI and the second by contraception. Pluto is generational and in this sense it is the death of our ‘we’ and the birth of the next generations ‘we’ as we become fewer and outdated. The 60’s represented the ability to let loose our inner vampire without slaughtering the innocents. Yet it is the innocent that is slaughtered in ‘The Graduate’ it is Elaine that suffers. 60’s is a time when people became drunk on their own freedom and it was the children who suffered sexual abuse and neglect under their new ideology.
“Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it by a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!”
Oscar Wilde ‘Ballad of Reading Jail’
Sun in Cancer understands the ‘we’ and our connection to it for they are ruled by the moon they understand full well the pain of being disconnected from it, excluded and exiled. When natal Pluto is in Aries, Cancer, Libra or Capricorn this relationship is a dynamic one which is very prominent in the consciousness of the individual. When natal Pluto is in Taurus, Virgo, Scorpio and Pisces the relationship is more a harmonious awareness of these attributes and their necessity in life. When natal Pluto is in Gemini, Leo, Sagittarius or Aquarius it is much harder to understand how these attributes have shaped and continue to shape your life.
When Pluto expression is blocked it can be expressed as negative Uranus behaviour such as refusal to conform without a purpose in doing so, disruptive behaviour and inability to be part of any group.
The third set of planets and the nodes of the moon are neither masculine or feminine but represent how we perceive reality and our lives. Saturn represents our own unique perception of reality, Mercury represents our own past experiences of reality which we use to imagine all present possibilities and predict the future. South Node of the moon represents our past wormhole of the personality and the ‘we’ we are born into. The North node of the moon represents the projected future of the wormhole of the personality until death when we finally leave the ‘we’.
“Hello, inner child, I’m the inner babysitter!” – Terry Pratchett ‘Hogfather’
Saturn represents our experience of reality. If you throw a brick in the air it is likely to come back down and hit you on the head, no matter how many times you throw it or what the Einstein Bose compensate (when atoms behave as waves in quantum physics) says ought to happen. Saturn is like Newtonian physics it is our own set of laws that govern our reality. If gravity didn’t exist and bricks floated in the air the idea of them falling and hitting you on the head would not make sense or be realistic it would be a Neptunian experience. Saturn does not deal with ideals, illusions and dreams like Neptune it deals with what happens when we fall or fail to prepare for winter. Irrespective of whether that should happen in an ideal world it is what happens in the real world. Saturn is the difference between ought and is. However Saturn also encompasses our confirmation biases if you are liberal left and think all poor white people are racist, you will exclude all evidence to the contrary and focus on any event no matter how small that confirms your biases.
This means that in astrology Saturn is often viewed negatively because it deals with how the world is rather than how we would like it to be and our biases towards other groups. Saturn makes us prepare, work hard and more importantly face the consequences of our own actions or inactions. Saturn says if you can’t do the time don’t do the crime. Saturn says there is no such thing as a free meal. Saturn says if you fly with the crows you get shot with the crows.
In mythology saturn is the son of Uranus, unknown unknowns Saturn is the opposite of his father he is the known knowns. If we swing on a chair we know that at some point it will tip backwards and we are likely to bang our head on the floor and it will hurt, it is a known known.
Saturn also represents parenting especially the setting of boundaries, laws or rules and consequences of actions. For each of us how we were parented will be different, we will have grown up with our own set of family rules that we take for granted. When we ourselves become parents we instinctively use those rules as a guide, this is when as parents we instinctively have two sets of rules each from our family and this is when things often get complicated. Unless we can communicate effectively we are likely to get frustrated with each other breaking the rules, because both will have different rules they are trying to apply. Saturn can block the full expression of other planets especially if we have had extremely authoritarian or permissive parents.
Saturn is the reality of your individual existence, the reality of your predicaments, frustrations, struggles, weariness, anxiety, alienation, dread, exclusion, sense of inauthenticity, sense of nothingness, sense of incompleteness, anticipation of aging, sickness and death. We can have no empathy without Saturn for to understand Saturn is to have empathy for the rest of humanity. Neptune is illusion it can never give us access to what it is for any individual to be human, Saturn is the realities of life for any individual and it is only through understanding their Saturn influences that we can have true empathy and understanding of them. This is why natal Saturn is very important in synastry.
“‘You can’t give her that!’ she screamed. ‘It’s not safe’ IT’S A SWORD, said the Hogfather. THEY’RE NOT MEANT TO BE SAFE. ‘She’s a child!’ shouted Crumley. ITS EDUCATIONAL. ‘What if she cuts herself?’ THAT WILL BE AN IMPORTANT LESSON.” – Terry Pratchett ‘Hogfather’
The Sun in Cancer is opposite Capricorn which is ruled by Saturn. These individuals understand the necessity of rules but they also understand the need for them to be just, fair and balanced. Sun in Cancer Saturn in Aries, Cancer, Libra or Capricorn individuals are very aware of just how hard and difficult life can be for others. Sun in Cancer, Saturn in Taurus, Virgo, Scorpio or Pisces recognise the necessity of Saturn influences in their lives and it’s more harmonious influences such as stability and security as contributing greatly to our successes and happiness in life. Sun in Cancer, Saturn in Gemini, Leo, Sagittarius or Aquarius individuals struggle with recognising its effects on their lives and in dealing with issues around it.
Saturn is how we interpret the past wormhole of the personality rationally. South Node of the moon is our personal emotional interpretation of it, it also represents epigenetics and genetics in general. How we felt about our parents, our childhood, family and friends. The special memories we have and our emotional responses to trauma and loss. As already stated the moon represents our ‘we’, the South Node of the moon represents the ‘we’ we are born into. It is also our genetic predispositions and epigenetics, how the effects of our ancestors lives changed their and our genes.
The south Node of the moon is the point where the moon passes the ecliptic or the path of the sun, to enter the celestial southern hemisphere. The Northern point of the axial tilt represents a point of mythological birthing of the universe a point the stars revolve around, with everything originating here and thus moving south mythologically.
South Node of the moon, encompasses our genetics, our environment and our own personal family history. More importantly it encompasses our emotional connection and access to these things, it is the beginning of where ‘I’ or the ‘Sun’ in astrology starts. We all begin as part of a ‘we’ before we learn to separate ourselves as individuals and develop our own unique ‘I’ of the sun. It represents the birthing of our individual consciousness. In the parable of the sower, seeds fall in the thorns, on the wayside and some in fertile soil. South node of the moon represents where the seed of your beginnings of consciousness fell. This makes it a very sensitive spot. It is the point that you as the sun emerged from the we of the family, parents and the moon. It along with the ascendant which is the Zodiac sign on the ecliptic east at the moment of your birth (the place where the sun rises each morning), represents the emergence of you as an individual. If you were born at sunrise your ascendant will be your sun sign, and this changes through the day as the sun and stars moves from its point of origin at dawn to the west to set.
The sun in Cancer is probably more sensitive to their South Node than most people. Sun in cancer South Node in Aries, Cancer, Libra or Capricorn will feel it the most. Sun in Cancer, South Node in Taurus, Virgo, scorpio or Pisces will be generally more accepting of the South Node and have the least issues. Those with Sun in Cancer and their South Node in Gemini, Leo, Sagittarius and Aquarius will struggle with understanding its effects on their life and just why this area is a sensitive one for them.
Our personality is like a wormhole through space and time from the moment of our birth to our death. It is the constant self throughout our life which is in continuous change. Mercury represents all the infinite wormholes that exist from this present moment in time. Before we act or make a decision there are infinite possible actions that can shape the direction our lives will take and each moment and decision has infinite possibilities. we explore these future possibilities through our imagination, all possible wormholes can be explored and when we make a decision we choose a preferred path that collapses the infinite possibilities. This is easy to do because all future wormholes are interconnected in future choices and consequences making them a network of possibilities rather than infinite separate routes. This is like the internet or the cerebral network in our brains which are both Mercurial.
Mercury is like quantum physics in this sense and quantum physics like all science comes from re-imagining the world based on past experiences and testing whether those future wormhole possibilities stand up to experimental evidence. Our imagination takes our past experiences (Saturn our known knowns) and uses them to try and predict future events, this is called a hypothesis. sometimes experiments prove our hypothesis wrong and we learn something new (Uranus our unknown, unknowns). With each new thing we learn there are infinite possibilities.
This is why although there are infinite possible types of bagel we could buy, we prefer the choice of one or two; because bagels are relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of things we call our lives. We don’t like to over invest our imagination in the relatively unimportant things though we like a choice, we like quick simple choices that allow us to live our lives. This is why optical illusions work, Saturn tells us that from past experience all noses stick out we don’t have to waste time imagining what type of nose you may have, we just skip it and presume it is the same as every other nose. Thus when we see the mask we see it with a nose pointing out because it saves us time and a lot of energy. We live in a world with much more information than we have time to filter, to weigh up and to imagine the possibilities it offers us. That means we have to become more and more selective about what information we deal with.
It also means we have to be more honest both climate changers and climate deniers are in fact identical they have neither the time, ability or resources to sift through the information at hand instead both sides are choosing an opinion – neither side is scientific or more rational than the other. Both sides are taking a short cut because we have more scientific information than any human can process and have a normal functioning life. Some scientists have to accept responsibility for this and start being honest, because they have been taking advantage of this situation to place themselves in a position no scientist should ever go to and that is the unquestionable authority – science works by questioning. In fact those that question the scientists findings are being more scientific than those blindly accepting them. However the obstacle still remains that the information is too numerous and complex for a simple answer or finding. There is no simple experiment or proof to give the people. Science like the news is one area where we have to accept we either spend all day checking the facts or we are just choosing an opinion that suits us at the present moment in time and fits into our own confirmation biases.
This is true also of academics they have no more real insight into facts than the rest of us have, they would not be able to function in their own fields if they spent their time investigating the facts of other fields they have to take a side or opinion too. Academics are of little use to us. We cannot trust their opinions more than our own because they too are just as blinded by their own confirmation biases. Add to this the fact that science is supposed to be falsifiable, but none of us happen to have large hadron colliders in our gardens to check whether we get the same results or not and you get to the point of where science is in danger of killing itself. Science that cannot be properly peer reviewed because it is too complex, and unfalsifiable ceases to become science and starts to become belief system.
This is why we were never meant to fully understand Uranus, because we cannot function when too many unknown unknowns become known, we cannot function when our systems are overloaded with too much information. We end up with people choosing scientists for climate change and demonising them for saying vaccines are safe, or vice versa people choosing the scientists on vaccines and demonising them over climate change. Add to this genetically modified crops and stem cell research and most people are all over the place.
However we are not the only ones. The average life science paper published today is twice the length it was 25 years ago, that means it peer reviewers who are also practicing scientists with their own work and deadlines have twice as much material to review. On top of this far more scientific papers are been published than ever before. This means that it becomes impossible for them to be reviewed to the same standards of 25 years ago. This is not just happening in one field, retractionwatch.com which specialises in anaesthesia papers that have been retracted and currently has at number one position Yoshitaka Fujii with 183 scientific papers retracted after it was discovered he was falsifying the results. 183 papers he published with falsified results passed through peer review process. Currently 500 anaesthesia papers a year are retracted, some with honest mistakes and others with faked statistics that have not been picked up by peer review or inconvenient facts that are omitted. Science papers get recited on average between 10 – 20 times over 5 years in other papers this means there are estimated to be 1000 papers a year published on cancer that are using unreliable data from other studies.
“There is a loquacity that tells nothing, which was Bathsheba’s, and a silence which says much; that was Gabriel’s.” – ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’ Thomas Hardy
Mercury represents the imagination and learning new information but it also represents communication. The enlightenment could never have happened without the printing press and the availability of books. Now we have the internet, we have access to information as never before. Good ideas are only useful if they are shared. However we are bombarded by memes to the point good ideas and anything of any relevance is drowned out in the information overload. This too is mercurial to have so much information and so little time to sort through it. This is something we must also take responsibility for, how much of the meaningless memes and garbage of the internet do we ourselves generate.
Mercury is about communication, we can sit on a log but when we call that log a chair we give it a purpose, and that purpose is to be sat on. We use language or more significantly words to give things a purpose.
“In the beginning was the word” – John 1:1
The word or logos is divine purpose. Genesis starts with logos, divine purpose of night and day, seasons, earth and all that live on it. This ends with the divine purpose of the sabbath, this creation story is a creation of purpose. It is not the how we got a universe but the why we have a universe and its divine purpose in our lives. Science can give us the how when it comes to our universe but the why cannot be found in science, the why is a set of philosophical ideas that give us and the world around us purpose and meaning. We give meaning and purpose to the unknown (Uranus) through our use of language (Mercury) this is why some confuse Uranus as a higher or God’s Mercury. The truth is we don’t know if God even has a Mercury for we cannot communicate with him/ her/ it, we decide he has a plan and we invent the plan and the purpose. God did not invent a plan for us we invented a plan for him and a divine purpose within our lives. In this way Mercury is the messenger of the Gods, for our Mercury decides or imagines his purpose and plan just as it imagines our purpose and the meaning of it. Mercury invents the meaning and purpose of events in our life and our relationship to the divine whatever that may be. This means that the infinite choices of the moment are always viewed through our imagined purpose of the divine and of ourselves.
Because Mercury is always close to the sun and is an important aspect of being conscious whatever our sun sign is we have a good understanding of its attributes and it is one of the most primal forces in our consciousness.
The North Node of the Moon represents death, the moment we leave the ‘we’. It also represents our emotional desires for the future such as children, grandchildren or ending world hunger. It represents the purpose we want to achieve with our lives before dying. The type of ‘we’ or society and family we want to have been part of creating and hope to be leaving at the point of death. North Node of the moon represents our full development of Neptune and Pluto emotional maturity or the sacred feminine to the point that we are ready to die without regrets. thus the North Node of the moon calls on us to gamble and take risks for what we want to achieve lest our talents forever remain unknown, unknowns even to ourselves. It also calls on us to learn from our life and appreciate all that it has to offer us and this is the full potential of the sacred masculine Jupiter and Uranus.
for the day will come when all the future possible wormholes of the personality cease to exist or collapse. If those with the Sun in Cancer have prepared themselves for the inevitable event they will be ready for the next stage. Saturn will have turned their wormhole into the reality of their lives and they will walk down it visiting the faces of those they loved and all the precious memories into the bright light of their birth. As they step beyond into the pre-existence or non-existence whichever they believe in happy with whatever they have achieved or accomplished in life.
Sun in Cancer in the 1st house
here there is a strong drive to connect with the environment and the community in order to create a more balanced society and give a shared sense of ownership of our natural resources. These individuals are usually more direct than most Sun in Cancer individuals and they can also exhibit a fiery temperament when they feel their family or community is being threatened. They tend to be passionate about their relationships and invest a great deal of energy in them. They love being with friends and family but these individuals are dynamic at getting what they want at work and in life in general.
Sun in Cancer in the 2nd house
Here there is a strong urge towards creating a very stable and fertile home environment. Whether that fertility is in a creative form or in the wise use of natural resources these individuals always make the most out of what they have in life. They are generally more emotionally balanced and calmer in their expression than a lot of people with the Sun in Cancer are. They tend to handle trauma and loss better than most and are often a tower of strength for family and friends at stressful points in their lives. These people are often also more outgoing than they first appear and can be the leader in their group of friends.
Sun in Cancer in the 3rd house
Here the individual is very expressive and open to all kinds of experience as they rarely feel uncomfortable with any type of new experience and situations. They are very matter of fact about relating to other people from varying backgrounds and work hard at seeing things from all types of experience and not just their own. However when it comes to what they want out of life these individuals can be very stubborn and stand their ground under immense pressure.
Sun in Cancer in 4th house
here everything is going on under the surface these people are very introspective and like to be alone with their thoughts to work out what exactly it is they feel and want. They are good at holding in their feelings and saying nothing but that is a shame for they are more vulnerable and a lot more sensitive than others realise. Part of this is they are also very capable and organised individuals and it is this practical and sensible side of their personality that most see but in private they like a shoulder to cry on and somebody to support them for a change.
Sun in Cancer in 5th house
These individuals are very expressive and tend to channel their emotions into creative projects of some type. They feel a strong connection with the natural world and children in particular. although they have a flair for the dramatic at times they are likely to be the most practical and reliable person in their group of friends. Most importantly they need to be able to express their emotions openly and honestly with others and like people who are also direct and to the point. They are good at understanding the darker impulses we all have and tend to be open to expressing them in some form.
Sun in Cancer in 6th house
Here the individual is very hard working and also feels very responsible for the welfare of those around them. They are at their best in close relationships where they have the confidence to express their dramatic or creative side more. They have a knack of turning their dreams into reality through sheer grit and determination. They also tend to be very direct in the way they talk to others and prefer people who are plain spoken and say what they mean, this does not mean they are nasty but that have a flair for relating to everybody without the need for fancy words.
Sun in Cancer in the 7th house
Here the individual tends to be very romantic and tends to invest a lot of energy in their close personal relationships. Relationships although important do not feel easy for these people due to an inner dynamic which pulls them in different directions when it comes to expressing their emotional needs. They tend to appear very self reliant and can be tough as old boots when they need to be but they need to feel relaxed and comfortable before expressing what they really want and at time their emotions can feel overpowering only because they are kept restrained most of the time.
Sun in Cancer in 8th house
These individuals can seem very intense but underneath it all they have a core stability that means they can weather any of life’s storms without completely losing the plot. Their intensity is not from an inability to cope but from a desire to really connect to other people and what it means to be human. Not only are they intense but they are also very direct and tend to go after what they want in life but can lose interest if they achieve things too quickly as they enjoy the struggle. These people are great fun to be around and like their friends to have a good time and enjoy themselves
Sun in Cancer in 9th house
These individuals have a bit of a dare devil streak to them that comes out spontaneously when most people least expect it to. They can be quite deep thinkers especially on issues of morality and ethics and have an intense desire to find their own intrinsic meaning within their lives. although they may be dreamers they are also down to earth and practical when it comes to putting their ideas into action. They have the drive and energy to work hard and achieve their dreams and also the ability to make others visualise the possibilities they believe in too.
Sun in Cancer in 10th house
here the individual is much more balanced in their emotional outlook than a lot of Sun in Cancer individuals because they have a strong inner core of stability. These people also don’t know what rest and relaxation is they are always striving in work, at home and in their personal relationships. They are direct in achieving what they want and don’t tend to stop until they win even in relationships they need a partner who will put up some resistance and fight for their corner. Often they come from a tough beginning in life and they know they won’t return to it without a fight.
Sun in Cancer in 11th house
Here the person places a great emphasis on friendship and camaraderie. They are very social in their outlook on life and tend to enjoy being part of the crowd which is unusual for most Sun in cancer. They are also more stubborn and determined than most and like to do things their own way. They also need more freedom and autonomy than most Sun in Cancer individuals and like to be part of many different groups. When it comes to love they are stubborn once they make their mind up they will not give in. They tend to feel passionately about equality and justice and are driven to protect the more vulnerable in society.
Sun in Cancer in 12th house
here the person is very introvert at times and needs space on their own to reflect. They have a vivid imagination and like to daydream, but all of this serves as creative source within their lives because they have the capacity to imagine things differently they als have the capacity to create those differences and often do. They are also very hardworking individuals and are very practical when their heads are not in the clouds imagining a different future for mankind.