Of Art and Applied Science

Cosmophilia: You Belong Here for Sagittarius

By Eric Francis


Sagittarius Part One

Sagittarius Part Two

Download mp3 archive.


Cosmophilia prologue

Cosmophilia houses


Sagittarius is the original visitor from far away. Long before science fiction, fantasy and Chariots of the Gods, there was Sagittarius, arriving on Earth from the Galactic Core, finding itself placed in this marvelous technological revelation known as the body. It is actual starstuff quickened to the point where it can support and be inhabited by sentient, self-aware consciousness, which must then experience every nuance of sensation, sensory data and feeling, in inescapable physical form.

Sagittarius is anything but the detached visitor, however. You are totally involved on this plane of reality, on every level. Sometimes you feel so much, you’re certain you’re going to burst.

Perhaps the Dreams are of Soulmates by Cameron Gray.

Perhaps the Dreams are of Soulmates by Cameron Gray.

The developments of 2015 will help you exteriorize and express yourself in a gradual, concentrated and focused way, without bursting.

Lately we’ve been experiencing a degree of beyond-all-limits activity in Sagittarius (many centaurs, Pluto-like objects and asteroids). This has been coupled with the constant presence of two deep-space points — the core of our galaxy and this even more prodigious thing called the Great Attractor, both of which have been under full activation, raising the temperature.

I would be surprised if you said your life was a well-contained, neat and tidy place in recent years. While Sagittarius is the sign of single-pointed determination, there have been a lot of those centaurs’ arrows flying around. And with many planets passing over the Galactic Core, one after the next since approximately 2006 when Pluto showed up there, your life has been like one long spiritual initiation. Your story would likely lend itself well to some epic novel where the protagonist goes through one life-changing event after the next, always certain that the most recent just had to be the last one. Then comes the next, and the next.

Add to that the fact that planets — potent, meaningful and full-spectrum planets — are gathering in Pisces, the most sensitive angle of your chart (the one describing your emotional body and your extended skin, the space you dwell in). This too has been going on for a while, steadily gathering in intensity for the past five years or so.

Pisces is a water sign, though it’s also the sign of images, illusions, gaseous matter, psychic material and the imagination. It’s a deeply sensitive and emotional sign, located in your chart right on the taproot; this emotional and psychic mélange is your security base. Far from standing on solid ground, Sagittarius lives in a kind of cosmic vortex. Your response to this is the source of your nonstop creative drive and seemingly endless energy.

But as I am suggesting here, recent years, perhaps the past five to 10 years, have been just wild, with no end in sight. Yet this year, one planet in particular begins to take precedence, and as a result many other factors move into the background. That planet is Saturn, which is going to be in your sign until late 2017, with the exception of three months in 2015 (June 14 through Sept. 15).  Normally, Saturn in Sagittarius would be something that astrologers whine about. Sagittarius is, after all, ruled by Jupiter, the supposed rival of Saturn. Jupiter represents the expansion principle for which Sagittarius and Pisces are so famous. Saturn represents the principles of structure and limitation, the supposed nemesis of these signs. However, I’ve seen no whining. I think that intuitively, astrologers know that Saturn in Sagittarius is going to provide a dearly needed stabilizing factor.

This is very good news indeed for those who are determined to get their lives together, muster up some serious discipline and make some changes. It is very easy for you to spread your energy thin, to set out to accomplish everything at once, and to live like there is no tomorrow. Yet while that can get things done, it’s not a helpful approach to real achievement. Saturn’s role is to slow the pace, help you cast your intentions in a more cautious and professional light, and in sum, to help you take yourself more seriously.

If you’ve been taking full advantage of the high-adventure factor of these transits, Saturn may seem to put a damper on that feeling for a while, but what it’s really doing is calling on you to concentrate your energy and focus some new goals — or some old ones. You are well past the ‘grasp onto anything that might work’ phase and now well into the ‘it’s time to be more conscious and careful, and to stack the deck in my favor’ phase.

There are many factors assisting with this. If the whole arrangement has one general theme, it’s getting a handle on your inner life, so that you can make some progress in both your inner life and your outer life. The aspects you’re currently under are urging you not to live one at the expense of another. Saturn is providing a strong container for your emotional reality as well as methods for how to gather your energies and your intentions and actually meet some of your many goals.

To do this, you will first need to prioritize. You don’t have to do this overnight, and remember, your priorities can change. But you might want to have a daily conference with yourself and make sure that you assess your long-term priorities on a daily basis. These are two scales of reality that you will benefit greatly from interrelating — the immediate and the long-range.

Where Saturn has Just Been

Saturn has just spent two years in Scorpio, your 12th house. (I accidentally typed 13th house, which is one of those true typos — consider the 12th as the kind of outcast house, stashed in its own dimension, off to the side of reality.) Both Scorpio and the 12th can be a repository of secrets, and when you combine them the effect is multiplied.

But Saturn going through this house makes it real, and what is real is a process of karmic cleanup, and a related process of facing your fears. You now know just about every issue that you have on your plate. You have got to know yourself inwardly in a way that nobody else knows you, and that they may never. And the message of Saturn in the 12th is that this doesn’t matter — what matters is that you are confident in who you are, regardless of any inner or personal challenges you may face. This is a healthy approach to living — being aware of your talents, your desires, your weaknesses and your issues. Just as you can develop your talents and fulfill your desires, you can also work to strengthen weak spots and resolve issues.

You might say that Saturn has squeezed a whole bunch of secrets out of you, for you to see — and to help clear your conscience. There’s likely to be a good bit of sexual information that you’ve revealed to yourself during this time; you may have had some profound comings-to-terms with your sexuality.

Saturn through the Scorpio 12th feels like you made some discoveries of biographical facts you had no idea existed. You may have had some revelations about ones you’re aware of, and come to terms with material you may have previously felt guilty about.

This kind of transit is helpful for learning to spend time alone, as well as to help you appreciate the company of others. What these both have in common is the result of being more comfortable in your own skin. One thing you may have figured out is that there is a palpable difference between being so and not being so. In the past you may have fuzzed over that distinction; now you get it. Now you know. I gather that you know the power of being confident and solid in yourself.

Saturn makes one final visit to Scorpio, between June 14 and Sept. 15. That is a tidy 90-day run that will remind you where you’ve been, and what still remains undone. You will very likely also have an opportunity to take care of one or two remaining matters that were left unfinished.

You might be tempted to leave this for some other time. I suggest you act straight away and take care of whatever this is; seek resolution, whether it’s with someone in your family, a partner or ex-partner, or within yourself. This is a chance to get it out of your way now, rather than putting it off for a future time.

Speaking of Your Family

One place where your healing process develops is around your family. The 4th house, where you have Pisces, often represents the family of origin. The questions about what’s in the shadows persist to some degree, though you’re personally a step removed from the issues. Where you coincide with them is when you reach that spot where they determine how you feel about existence or about yourself.

The thing to watch closely is when and where you feel safe, and when and where you feel unsafe, and to see if there is any prompting to a matter of family history. This is a broad statement, I know, though there are indicators that the observations will be more obvious than they will be riddled with mystery or ambiguity.

The part that may require some skill is sifting through your environment to determine what is really going on; what is at issue and what its origin is. Part of the problem is that there seems to be some veil thrown over your family history even when it’s bright and clear out. Now things are a bit foggy and you will need to use certain mental tools to deduce what you need to know — for example, logic. Listening. Checking what you remember as a child against what you’ve found out as an adult — or found out recently.

There are features of the emotional landscape that it’s easy to tune out, whether it’s because ‘that’s the way things always were’ or whether it’s because it’s too weird to acknowledge. Both of those scenarios can allow things to slip into the background or to disappear. Your job is to keep an eye both on the figure, that is, the topic at hand, and the background.

Meanwhile, I suggest that if you note any issues of trust emerging within your own household, take that as a clue that there is something deeper going on; that what you’re experiencing now is some kind of surface manifestation of something else, something perhaps buried deep in the past.

The sooner you focus these themes the better. The approximate timing involves Saturn in your sign making a square to Neptune in Pisces, your 4th house, in November 2015, right around your birthday. That’s going to press the issue. Ideally you want to be well ahead of this transit; do your homework, be that personal inner searching, spiritual work, therapy or good old-fashioned conversation with the people who may be involved.

This is a major opportunity for healing. It is, in particular, a profound opportunity on the level of self-confidence — that is, on the level of your foundation. There can be no authentic confidence without a strong foundation. Yet your foundation is soft; it’s cosmic; it’s described by the sign Pisces. The way to keep Pisces strong is to keep it honest; to avoid denial; to look for the invisible. You must, at least, be willing to question or not believe what is not true. You need to be willing to ask questions without fear of what answer comes up.

Emotional deception and self-deception are easy, and they will have a tendency to erode your inner strength. So the antithesis I am suggesting is a thorough assessment of everything involving home, any element of your security base, your current family and your family of origin.

This will take integrity, which, fortunately, you have plenty of.

Freedom Within Yourself

The Uranus-Pluto square, an aspect with effects lasting well over a generation, is gradually moving through some of the most personal areas of your chart — and is pushing you to a new depth of liberation within yourself.

This aspect is turning the world on its head; it’s radicalizing people, and provoking confusion and rebellion. Yet not everyone is responding to it in a destructive way; many are responding by picking up on the quest for freedom and progress that this aspect offers, and for you this is especially poignant.

It’s associated with the overall trend in your charts of freeing yourself from what you’ve accumulated in the past, and striving to bring yourself into the moment in a self-aware way, and as independent as you can be. Also following the pattern of other transits, there’s an interior and an exterior dimension to this aspect pattern.

It affects two houses, primarily: your 2nd house (values, available resources, self-respect) and your 5th (pleasure, play, creativity, taking risks).

Few people would describe Sagittarius as reserved, conservative or risk-averse. Yet this seems to be a dependable streak in your character that, with assistance from various forces of nature, you’re working to transform. It has served you well, though it’s going to serve you far better in its more evolved form.

You had Pluto in your sign between 1995 and 2009, which was an enormous push for independence and focused identity. Any transit in your sign that lasts more than 15 years will have a way of gathering strength around it, especially Pluto. Yet when Pluto left your sign in 2009, it ingressed your 2nd house or Capricorn, which is an extension of your identity. One thing that identity reveals is how much of your values system is rooted in tradition, a tradition that you’ve been reviewing and updating for a long time.

What you’re looking for in this process are the aspects of your values that are no longer active evaluations of existence. Pluto plus Capricorn is very much an active evaluation, and you’re clearing ideas out of the way, making room for new ones, and giving yourself a new meaning for what this concept of ‘independence’ means. Clearly any independent person is grounded in society, and that means in relationship to other people, though it’s the inner structures of those relationships that I’m describing.

To give a simple example, say you have rigid concepts of ‘friend’, ‘boyfriend’ and ‘husband’ (or choose your preferred gender). You will tend to find people who fit those roles. They appear to be outside you but really they are based on internal structures. But let’s say one of two things happens. Case One, someone comes along who is part lover, collaborator and friend. You have no fixed category for that. If you want this person in your life, you have to create some space within yourself. But this requires adjusting your values. You might say you have to give yourself permission. That can be a challenge, but you want this person in your life; and you have to make some decisions, and let go of some of your definitions.

In instance 2, you notice that those artifices of friend, boyfriend and husband are starting to crumble, for no specific reason. You begin to seek out people who cross the boundaries or who don’t fit any of them, as a natural response to your inner changes.

Either one of these things could be happening, though imagine it on many different levels, such as your approach to work, to money, to raising your children, to your relationship to existence. Either you are making adjustments, or you’re being confronted by changes that compel you to do so. In either case, the result is a kind of evolutionary progress, growth and steady process of change.

There’s a second planet involved in this, called Uranus. Uranus is the revolutionary, the subversive, the agitator and the inventor. It can come on like a storm, intermittently, when it feels like it, though lately its action has been more sustained.

Right now it’s moving through Aries, which is your 5th house — the one about pleasure, play, fucking, art and taking risks. This is a seven-year trip, which is more than half done. It began in late 2010 and fully engaged in March 2011. Wherever someone has Aries in their chart, they will do plenty of identity seeking, and you do that in a 5th house style. This is one of the things in your chart that says ‘born artist’.

The reason it says born artist is because one way or another, you’re going to take the chance to be yourself and you’re going to do it in an expressive way. When you add Uranus to the mix, you’ve shifted this to the level of an outright revolution. There might be a measure of glitz and glam associated with this, because Uranus in its less interesting form can be obsessed with appearances (especially in a fire sign) but you are fully absolved of that.

You are absolved because Pluto’s action is so deep, which is ensuring that the action of Uranus will be sincere. This is a quest for inner freedom that is resulting in the experience of seeking outer freedom of creation, of expression and of action. This is freedom of a kind you might not have taken in the past, because your own inner values structures were a bit too predefined, a bit too boxy. But now those values or inner presets are changing — they have been for a few years, and you are catching up to that process in the risks you’re taking in your creative/expressive life.

The two make one another meaningful; you affirm your values by taking risks expressing yourself. Your values find a mode of real-world expression as you let go of your conditioning by previous generations and step into the reality of your own ideas, and the reality of who you are. One of the most vital places this will take root is the sensation of how resourceful you are. It’s as if you’ve discovered a mine within yourself, where you can extract valuable elements that have sat dormant for many years.

Attention to Detail and ‘Don’t Judge Your Performance’

All of this can and eventually will work its way into your drive for achievement in the world, though that’s a house that’s got some unusual conditions influencing it. The truly expressive and even explosive quality of the houses in your chart that I’ve described is matched by a highly focused 10th house, which is Virgo — where you seek your true success.

There is an influence on this house that could be described as restrictive, as judgmental or as specific. With transits, you can often choose the level you want to take the event on. I know this might sound strange, but just as you can choose to take Saturn on the level of an external force keeping you in line, or as an internal one that is motivating your self-discipline, you can pretty much choose the level you want to take any transit on.

The influence on your 10th is, for the first eight months of the year (and well beyond), called Transpluto. That is saying: beware of self-judgment, in particular of judging your performance. At some point you might evaluate, but stick to preparation. If you have to evaluate, get the assistance of someone who is good at doing that in a balanced way, because the risk you run is picking up on the limited perceptions of your parents or other early authority figures, and basically discouraging yourself.

You will benefit from using your intelligence and creative power to focus on highly specific tasks associated with your vocation. I suggest you skip the career thing and do what you’re actually called to do — not what someone said you were supposed to do, or said you would make more money at. Such assertions by others from your past are the very thing you’re working to uproot and recreate with the transits I’ve described, particularly those to your 2nd and 4th houses.

But now comes the moment when you have to make real decisions about what to do and how to direct your energy, and I suggest you start with modest goals that you do very well. Choose tasks you know you can complete, and strive for doing so with an emphasis on very high-quality work.

You might start with some things that have been on your agenda for a while, deciding that now is the time to ‘get around to it’ — as in right now.

You might start with how you present yourself, and take incremental steps toward doing that in better ways. Do small things you then accumulate into something that accrues into a reputation, for what you want to be known.

Recognize your specific leadership style and the ways that it’s about a focus on detail — then take care of those details.

What I am suggesting in essence is that you work in miniature, with no concern about the ultimate impact of what you do. Focus, rather, on refinement, accuracy, quality and specificity of purpose. Later in the year, Jupiter will cross the midheaven of your chart (the 10th house, the one I’m riffing on here), and that will have the property of enlarging your efforts; of raising their scale.

Jupiter is a reassurance of some success, though it will tend to magnify what is already there. This is why I’m suggesting you work small, then take care of the scale factor in a second pass. Use the idea of prototypes, do your experimentation, take notes and use the concept of applied science in whatever you’re doing. Other factors in your chart say that the intuitive factor is strong (and will be getting stronger). You can bring the mental, intellectual and technical dimensions. If you do, I feel confident that you will be guided in how to do that the most effective ways, remembering that a spirit of experimentation is essential to the concept of applied science.

Postscript from Asbolus

Remember that there are other people who are not as adapted to life, or this time in history, as you are. It’s true that you often live here like a visitor, and one thing you notice is how the natives so often struggle.

You have an ongoing choice who to relate to, and how. A newish planet called Asbolus is making its way through your 7th house of relationships. It’s in the centaur class, like a number of other planets I’ve been writing about throughout these readings (for example, Chiron and Nessus).

With Asbolus, the first step to take is to see the common ground between you and anyone you encounter. Focus on that common ground.

It would also help to keep an ear out for how people learn from their struggles. The people you’re likely to get along with best are the few who have been through real difficulties, and who take that to heart; who have actually learned something that they keep actively at the front of their minds.

People have many reasons to want to be involved with you. It’s true that some will be intimidated, but I suggest you not take that seriously. If you notice that as a pattern, strive to be more comfortable in your own skin. Don’t worry about the responses or reactions of others; rather, keep your mind on your own emotional presence, your own suspension of judgment of yourself and your process of deepening your perceptions and expressing yourself.

You cannot change others but you are certainly growing and changing in astonishing ways. You can do plenty to harmonize with that, to drop your resistance to that process — and this, in turn, will open up pathways of communication with others. Following the theme of inner developments leading to outer ones, I suggest you allow that to come as an outgrowth of the amazing progress you’re making rather than as a primary goal. It’s easier, and I think it works a lot better.

Charts


Sagittarius chart.

Sagittarius chart.

Sagittarius sketch.

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