Astrology isn’t worth much unless it’s applicable in and to your life. Assuming you agree with that assertion, the question of how to make astrology applicable depends on what your life consists of. Change is very possibly the only constant in life, so that’s one thing. Also, carrying on with your life does seem to require self-awareness possessed both of and by a physical body.

Hence, your life in this material world might to be said to at least include change and possession as fundamental constituents. Possession in this, our material world, must likewise include a relationship with tangible things.

In astrology, tangible things correlate closely with the four elements: fire, earth, air and water. Among those four, earth could reasonably be considered the most tangible element.

Change is something that takes place over time, and time is anything but tangible. For astrologers, change might be said to correspond with the three qualities: cardinal, fixed and mutable. Of those three, mutability would logically be considered the most change-able quality because (as Eric noted in a recent podcast) it can best and most often evince something of the other two.

Each of astrology’s twelve signs is distinguished in part from the other eleven by a unique combination of element and quality. After the Sun enters Virgo shortly after 6:37am EDT (10:37:14 UTC) on Sunday, the solar emblem of consciousness will be expressing through the one and only sign that combines earth with mutability.

Each of the signs is also distinguished in part by a ruling planet. Mercury rules Virgo. Virgo is also where Mercury is exalted. Indeed Virgo is the only sign which doubles down in that way. Since one of the ways Mercury manifests in your life is as mind and the means by which mind makes itself known, solar Virgo is an appropriate time to be aware of, think about and discuss change, possession and your relationship with both.

At first, the combination of mutability with earth might appear to be a contradiction. The same might be said for the combination of change and possession, but that would be over-simplifying things. Granted, one does customarily construct a building’s foundation on the ground rather than in the air, on a fire, or in the water. But earth in the elemental sense entails more than just the ground under your feet.

Earth as a planet and in the elemental sense is a dynamic thing. Earth as a planet is the field upon which change plays out in your life. Earth in the elemental sense is also what change acts upon so as make the intangibility of time evident. Hence, possession on Earth is not really owning stuff, it’s owning your place in a dynamic. Indeed, ownership of tangible things (including your body) is ultimately among the most fundamental of over-simplifications.

Ultimately, all tangible things are shared. Your body is not a static thing; it is a dynamic thing. Energy, solids, air and water all pass through your body. With few exceptions, the material that makes most of your physical being turns over and is replaced many times in the course of your life. Ultimately, and without exception, every last atom is returned to the physical realm when your life is over.

You bring no tangible things, including your body, into this world with you – it is all acquired here. Neither do you leave this world with your body or any other tangible things. All you leave with is what you have done while acting as a custodian.

Hence, the greatest form of possession is to consciously own any changes you bring about by what you do with your body and other tangible things while you are here. Likewise, the most lasting and meaningful changes are made not on the material world and its things, but with them on yourself.

The essentials of change and possession are thus fundamental to the mutable earth that is Virgo, and all the things that Virgo can be construed to mean. This year, that essence will be symbolically encountered by the Sun in Virgo as never before in your life.

For this year, very shortly after the Sun enters Virgo it will conjoin with Jupiter to amplify the essence. Furthermore, as it applies to conjoin with Jupiter, the Virgo Sun will simultaneously oppose the centaur object Nessus, retrograde in Pisces. In the words of Cam Hassard, Nessus correlates with the “complex interplay of causes and effects.” And it is largely through your engagement with possession and change that cause and effect are manifested in the world.

That combination of aspects (Sun opposing Nessus while moving to conjoin Jupiter) upon the Sun’s ingress to Virgo is without precedent in your lifetime. Hence, the initiation of solar Virgo this year will apply to your life as at its most fundamental as never before in your experience. Of course, you have a place in all of this. Your place is to make it real.

To make it real you need to become a part of this historically significant solar ingress to Virgo. Cause and effect begin with you. In order for the astrology to apply to you, you must apply yourself. It means applying yourself and all you possess with conscious awareness and mindful intent. Not to change the world, but to change yourself into the best agent of cause and effect you can be. That’s how astrology works. That’s why it will be good to be alive when the Sun enters Virgo this year.

Offered In Service

Len is available for astrology readings. You can contact him at lenwallick [at] gmail [dot] com.

By Amanda Painter

Esteemed astrologer Robert Hand has described squares between the Sun and Saturn with this question: “How much self-gratification do you owe yourself, and what duties and responsibilities do you owe others?” You very well may be grappling with this question, especially if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, and are only now getting around to some form of “summer vacation.”

HIggins Beach, Scarborough, Maine. Photo by Amanda Painter.

The late-Leo Sun is square Saturn in Scorpio now, and the aspect is exact tomorrow (Friday) at 7:40 pm EDT (23:40 UTC). Chances are you’ve been feeling its influence all this week.

With the signs involved, “self-gratification” in the form of play, creativity, pursuits that hearken back to childhood, and perhaps some desire to have a bruised ego stroked may form one side of the equation. On the other side you’re likely noticing questions of financial stability or limitation; the boundaries (real or perceived) of sexual energy and sharing; and the need to see what has truly changed in those areas in the last two years (and last few months).

For many people, the very mention of responsibility, authority and limits calls to mind baggage-laden images of restrictive parents, domineering or punitive employers, and a long list of “shoulds” guaranteed to dampen one’s mood. Or it might kick up a streak of rebelliousness if you have made a habit out of defining yourself in opposition to anyone who has ever tried to tell you what to do.

None of that is much fun. In fact, it is downright energy sapping. It can even influence people to self-sabotage their own goals. If you take refuge only in self-gratification without taking any responsibility whatsoever — whether for your own emotional reactions, your desires, or the effort you need to make to get from Point A to Point B as an adult — it’s hard to get very far in life.

Same with taking responsibility for the ways you may project negativity onto others who you perceive to hold power over you. Often when we feel powerless in the face of authority, we’re actually projecting our own negative perceptions of a situation onto the authority figure we’re dealing with, rather than seeing the power we truly have or the ways we’re holding ourselves back.

As children, often we do not have much power; as adults, we can carry that child-parent dynamic with us, when it has longed ceased to serve us. So how do you deal with that if you’re facing it now? How do you find the balance between self-gratification and your adult duties and responsibilities?

Step one is to check your assumptions about the things being required of you that you don’t feel like doing. Are they really that bad/boring/wasteful/time-consuming/difficult/pointless, etc? Is there truly nothing valuable you can gain from doing it? Does it contribute to a greater whole in ways you have not thought about yet?

Another step, again suggested by Robert Hand, is to see if you can convert your sense of impatience with any restrictions into self-discipline. That sounds great — but how the heck do you do that? Last I checked, nobody had invented a self-discipline magic wand. Imagine how different the world would be if someone had.

What is ‘self-discipline’, anyway? Is it really just forcing yourself to do what you don’t want to do? Or is it more like allowing yourself to find some spark of childlike wonder, play or learning in what needs to be done — curiosity mixed with satisfaction in accomplishment?

That sounds simplistic; perhaps in some situations it is. But in researching the astrology to write this, I was reminded of this little deck of inspirational cards that used to be at my former chiropractor’s office. I forget the name of the deck and of the man who created them, but one of the cards stands out to me. It said something like:

“Do only what brings you joy. If that is not possible, find joy in all that you do.”

Again, that sounds simplistic, but I think it holds a valuable key to Sun square Saturn and this question of taking responsibility, yet enjoying life. So often, how we feel about what must be done — and getting ourselves to do it — just comes down to perspective. A perspective of opening ourselves to curiosity, learning, accomplishment and generosity goes a long way to being able to find joy in one’s duties, as well as in the activities that we do for our own pleasure.

And yes, sometimes it takes more than a blog post to get us there. Therapy is a valuable tool in getting out from under the shadowy thumb of whoever used to wield power in our lives. A reality-check conversation with your most motivated friend could help you pick that lock, too.

One final note about the Sun in Leo square Saturn in Scorpio: moving right along with the Sun as it finishes in Leo and enters Virgo Sunday is the asteroid Eros. Eros is named for the god of love and erotic energy.

This is a good time to practice taking responsibility for your own orgasm, pleasure, libido and self-love. If that isn’t the perfect merging of self-gratification, responsibility, love and joy ever, I don’t know what is.

Dear Madame,

I’m probably going to shock your readers with this statement, but it’s true. I am a shy Leo lass. I account this to my Pisces rising sign and because my Sun is in the 6th house. I have a Libra Moon in the 7th, but have only found this makes me an agreeable collaborator and project lead. In sum, I’m a terrifically hard working artist who really wants the whole world to fall at my feet and marry me — if only I could pry my stiff fingers away from my Wacom!

Lately I’ve been cultivating a deep vein of nostalgia for an old love of mine, a Virgo who brought a lot of yin to my artist’s yang, and just popped up in town again. I’d say he was a lover, but it never got that far in the flesh. I was happy to indulge the fantasy of him, instead; and well, hell, he was a fantastic, acerbically divine muse while we worked together a few years ago.

But now he’s long gone, and though this year has been mega professionally successful, personally I’ve been feeling uncharacteristically and uncomfortably hollow inside throughout much of this Venus retrograde; particularly this past week. I feel that not only have I missed this vital Virgo dreamboat, he will never return to my dock again. Is it too late to get wet?

The Trippin’ Leo Torch-Bearer

Dear Torchy,

I recently saw a video of an amazing invention: an augmented reality sandbox — a three dimensional topographical map space that allows kids to move sand around while colored lights respond in real-time to the children’s constant reshaping of the space. With the scoop of a hand, suddenly the deep blue of a concavity became a bright red mountaintop!

When I read your note, I couldn’t help but think about this video.

My first piece of advice about all nostalgia trips is this: know which map you’re looking at and from what vantage point was it created. Like sand in a child’s hand, the material of our memories gets pushed around so that ponds become plateaus, and mountains more like foothills. The cartography of love’s labors lost is notoriously imprecise and predictably unpredictable.

On the other hand, I think everyone needs an augmented reality sandbox the size of a swimming pool, where we can jump in with our whole selves and throw our total bodies into the effort of rearranging our interior landscapes, including memories. Disagree away, but there’s room in my world for big playful gobs of ‘what if’.

That’s the amazing difference between us and other species (so far as we know now): we can play games all day with probabilities, speculations and just plain guessing. Imagination is fun! Play is practice for life, right?

Obviously at some point we need to stop practicing and do the thing. We need to step out of the sandbox and onto something more like stable ground. Or, yes, risk The Coif and get wet.

Which is the greater problem, then: augmented reality or risk? For you, I gently propose augmented reality is the lesser evil. Who enjoys getting turned down? No one! Certainly not you, the sensitive one who prides herself in making good choices, producing exemplary work, and showing herself to be the gracious and diplomatic better among equals in your little round table of creative quests.

About your Moon, though: Libra is a sign that would rather be in charge of the seating arrangements in life, even as it makes others feel as if they’re the honored guest of the hour. Letting others name the head count can be your secret challenge; you can’t stand the idea of being left out, but forfeiting your control over certain details threatens your innate experience of leadership.

Love can be a trust fall, and in the 7th house, your Moon seeks satisfaction in knowing it can fully trust its own judgment — and that of others. Can you risk The Coif to the messy stakes of the heart, and possibly land in the deep end? Your Libra Moon may need a swim cap.

Perspective for your map: Venus is only half done with Leo, and she doesn’t turn direct until Sept. 7. Before she does, the coming Full Moon in Pisces Aug. 29 will light up your rising sign, followed by a frisky conjunction of Venus and Mars in Leo on Sept. 1. That’s a lot of information and observation coming your way! Use it. Mine it. Push it around in your personal giant sandbox of augmented reality.

As for your Virgo friend, September’s eclipses could shift his sandbox, too. By November, Venus and Mars make their third and final exact conjunction of 2015 — this time in the sign Virgo. Much of this summer’s landscape may be unrecognizable for both of you by then, and that will be an excellent moment to reassess your heart’s coordinates.

Keep glowing,
Madame Z

Most of us are born with two eyes that coordinate with each other to provide an accurate picture of the world. One affliction that interferes with quality of vision is called strabismus, wherein the eyes do not align properly. An extreme example of strabismus is crossed eyes, which cause double vision.

Nearly all of us have had occasion to cross our eyes on purpose in an expression of jest. Involuntary double vision, however, is no joke for those who have to live with it.  

Thankfully, medical science has developed ways to correct most cases of strabismus. It was not always so, however. For most of human history, those beset with double vision had to rely on the ability of the human brain to compensate for dysfunctional eyes.

One way the brain compensates for double vision is by ignoring the input of the deviated eye, but at the cost of depth perception. The result is one form of distortion unconsciously exchanged for another. Given the state of the world at this time, it would be accurate to aver that nearly all of us are vulnerable to (if not clearly burdened with) a metaphorical form strabismus. It’s also fair to say that the times are being reflected in the astrology.

The sheer volume of information coming at you is enough to cross your eyes all by itself. Astrology’s corollary to information (and your mind, among other things) is fast-moving Mercury.

Then, factor in the probability that a large volume of data you receive is intentionally slanted in spite of any claim to be (for example) “fair and balanced.” Finally, layer on the studied and tested manipulative psychology employed by the political, entertainment and advertising industries, and it’s a wonder you can function as well as you do.

One way you and most of the rest of us remain functional in the midst of media onslaught is to be selective about exposure to information. Shutting out, avoiding and otherwise ignoring that which conflicts with or distresses your point of view, however, has its own problems. Even new evidence, when admitted, is commonly interpreted to confirm what you already believe (a tendency known as ‘confirmation bias’).

Confirmation bias is an occupational hazard for astrologers. In an effort to overcome personal prejudice, astrologers often defer to and rely on traditional forms of interpretation. Even then, astrology can at times present a confusing picture, which, ironically, is often an accurate representation of what’s actually going on.

One could make a case for now being one of those times. Tellingly, one of the planets most emblematic of these times is Neptune in the sign it rules — Pisces.

Neptune is not to be underestimated. As the great Robert Hand put it, Neptune correlates with what is “confusing and unclear” at least as often as it corresponds to “extremely beautiful and ideal influences.” Up until about five years ago, when Neptune entered Pisces for the first time in a century and a half, nobody (nor their parents, nor even their grandparents) had any experience of living through an era of Neptune implicitly being amplified in Pisces.

Indeed, the world is still influenced by both the distorted thinking (Confederate flag and such) and inspiration (Thoreau and his contemporaries) which originated the last time Neptune passed through Pisces — basically from 1849 to 1862. Additionally, Neptune, along with complex and nuanced Chiron, is currently retrograde in Pisces, symbolically adding to the potential for confusion.

Further contributing to the potential for confusion is Saturn, astrology’s lord of order. Saturn is in a transitional year, spending most of 2015 slowly oscillating over the cusp separating two very different signs: Scorpio and Sagittarius. Even though Saturn is no longer retrograde, it is still in the same degree of Scorpio it occupied on July 4, indicative of little (if any) progress in bringing any semblance of order to your life or the world as a whole.

Finally, Uranus (which a normally circumspect Robert Hand recently referred to as “a crazy planet”) is also retrograde in Aries. At the same time, the ruler of Aries (Mars) is actually moving faster than Venus, which hardly ever happens.

Fortunately, just as medical science has its remedies for strabismus, astrology has its antidote for confusing times: patience. Everything in the sky and on the zodiac is constantly moving. As a result, no one state of affairs holds forever. And just as it is above, so it reliably is below.

In our current case, the dominant role of slow moving planets (Saturn, Uranus and Neptune especially) in fast-moving times implies that you need to be more patient than perhaps at any time in your life. The good news is that a light is visible at the end of our proverbial tunnel. Next month, Saturn will settle into Sagittarius for a long run of more than two years. After September, the eclipses of 2015 will be over, and by mid-October all the Mercury retrogrades for the year will be behind us.

Indeed, things might actually get a little boring later this year. Once you are able to see things more clearly, the stark nature of a less distorted reality might seem somehow less interesting. So, make the best of confusing times while you have them. Allow for your probable double vision to contribute to your creativity and stimulate your imagination while you still can, just so long as you are aware that seeing and believing are not what they used to be.

Offered In Service                   

Len is available for astrology readings. You can contact him at lenwallick [at] gmail [dot] com.

By Sarah Taylor

There were two things that I noticed initially with the three cards in this week’s reading.

First, there are two major arcana cards enclosing a minor: there is a point of presence in the everyday of the larger soul themes (the majors) that underpin your life and which need minors such as this to make themselves known tangibly to you.

The Hermit, Two of Swords, The Lovers from The Röhrig Tarot deck, created by Carl-W. Röhrig. Click on the image for a larger version.

Second, the two swords at the top of the picture in the Two of Swords indicates a kind of exchange or reciprocity between the two majors — perhaps a conversation, a working out, or working through at the mental level. Some breathing space is opening up. A negotiation is at hand.

These two majors are both associated with the personal end of the 22-card scale that ranges from card 0 to card XXI. What does this mean? In the same way that the zodiac signs travel along a continuum from the outward-focused, self-defining “I am” of Aries to the transpersonal, collective unconscious of Pisces, so the majors move from the zero-point field of The Fool, to the birth of consciousness, to its manifestation in human form — and finally to the experience that that human moves through as it becomes increasingly aware of its place in the interconnectedness of all things.

Here, in this reading, things are on the more personal end of the scale. This is immediately about you, and your experiences with and as yourself, and with another or others. It is self-centred, self-defining. You are working something out in your world, and it holds in it the tension and potential alliance of two contrasted ideas that are, at heart, connected.

On the left, you are The Hermit: solitary, reflective, sitting in your hermitage in the act of sifting through and transforming your inner darkness. The Hermit is The Magician who has understood that true magic depends upon the connection to one’s own core wisdom — the inner fire that burns and which itself is a product of the great mystery. The Hermit is The Magician, humbled. He understands his divinity, and life has also granted him the ability to experience his humanness; he is the meeting point of both. It is The Hermit’s inner work that then leads to the shift and change that comes with The Wheel of Fortune.

And yet, on the right, you are also The Lovers: experienced through togetherness, the reflection of a counterpart, sleeping in coupledom as you look into the mirror and are offered the choice: What do I choose to see?

Is my certainty about what I’m looking at simply a statement about what I know about myself rather than the person in front of me? Who am I, really? Who are you?

The Lovers is an interesting card to me because so many tend to associate it immediately with romance and romantic love. This is apropos, because so many of us tend to associate intimate relationship pretty immediately with romance and romantic love. We get swept up in the mirror of our own falling in love with ourselves, and perhaps brush over an opportunity to sit with what we don’t know about that other person. When we embrace that opportunity, in that moment we are also letting go of the certainty that we actually know ourselves.

Can we be as comfortable with mystery in the seductive coupling of The Lovers as The Hermit learns to be in a solitude that rarely offers up such easy answers? It all comes full circle for me when I remember that in the Thoth Tarot deck, it is The Hermit who presides over the marriage of the two figures in The Lovers. The connection between the cards is a strong one, and here the connection is brought forward again by the Two of Swords.

We are knowable; we are unknowable. We are individuals; we are connected, incontrovertibly, to our core, to each other, to everything. We can hold our own; we can hold another.

This is a dialogue between the states of independence, dependence, and interdependence. Give that dialogue some wiggle room to take place — even if it is simply the possibility of dialogue — and something quite magnificent can happen: the world expands, movement is invited in. There are peace, co-operation, and the formation of some kind of alliance between two aspects of your experience that are now prepared and able to talk to each other.

Here, you can clear a lot. Remember what it has been like to connect inwardly, and remember the sense of what you found in that connection. Now, you can use it beyond the front door of your hermitage, in the most practical of ways and in your relationships with others. Keep the lines of communication open — first with yourself. The rest will follow.

Astrology/Elemental correspondences: The Hermit (Virgo), Two of Swords (Moon in Libra), The Lovers (Gemini)

If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread.