Listen for Sagittarius and Sagittarius Rising

2013 Annual Horoscope by Eric Francis

Sagittarius Part One
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Sagittarius Part Two
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Music for Sagittarius – Mystery Song by Blue O’Connell
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Listen for Sagittarius and Sag. Rising | 2013 Annual Reading by Eric Francis
Full minor planet list for the day that the Sun arrives in your sign.

Sagittarius has a special place in astrology and astronomy. It’s not just that you would go to Hong Kong on an hour’s notice, though you might — your love of the exotic and the distant is encoded right into your sign. You love the call of adventure and of the unknown, and this will work its magic in your life even if other aspects of you are less experimental.

Sagittarius is the home to the core of our galaxy, the Milky Way. It’s also home to a kind of central gravitational field called the Great Attractor, toward which some vast number of galaxies are being drawn at a million miles per hour. Everything in the local universe is rushing in the direction of your sign.

There is an unusual potency to this sign, which accounts, in part, for the larger-than-life quality of many of its natives, and perhaps some of their unusual accomplishments. Yet though you may live as if your life is on another scale, it’s vital to remember that you are human with human frailties. Like everyone’s, your creativity must be harnessed and put to use for the greater good. And like everyone, you contain all of human potential. This is an essential point, that I will come back to shortly.

If you have an abundance of creative flow, you also have special challenges focusing it. It seems like so much is possible, for you to focus on any one thing is to miss the rest. I just cracked open a fortune cookie that was on my desk. It said, “A man without aim is like a clock without hands, as useless if it turns as if it stands.”

Though your sign is described by the one-pointed arrow of intention, this is not always true for you; it’s more like something you aspire to, and I would call it a healthy aspiration. In recent seasons, though, it’s been easier for you to latch onto the leadership and example of others. Fortunately this has led you in positive directions, at least most of the time, though it’s clear that you’ve allowed external influences to have greater sway in your life than you like to admit is true to your fiercely independent nature.

You can be guided and directed, as if by the wind. You certainly have it in you to claim autonomy and authority as your way of life, though there seems to be some soul-searching necessary that stands between you and that state of being. Indeed, it is soul that would direct you, the thing that would guide you in the way you’ve chosen. Hence it’s worth looking for, and if you look, you will find it.

Yet in these years of your life, it doesn’t surprise me if you’re feeling like focus and direction are even painful to seek. You may feel like there are so many of you that you don’t know what inner voice, instinct or impulse to trust. It’s therefore easier to trust others, those who you think understand you.

I would say that by June, when your ruling planet Jupiter changes signs from Gemini to Cancer, you will see how you did over the preceding year. If you decide then that you need to change course, revise commitments or make some new decisions, June is the month to do so. My sense is that you will only need to do this minimally.

You’ve definitely chosen a new course, one that you’re likely to be with for a while, even as you sort yourself out. In any event, that deserves re-evaluation — on an ongoing basis. There are too many forces at work in your chart and in your life for you to take your direction for granted. Pay attention to where you’ve been, where you are, which way you’re headed and most of all, where you want to be.

Small World Stories

There is a metaphor for your identity quest in the planets. Astronomy has discovered many thousands of bodies orbiting our Sun since the 1970s, of many varieties: asteroids, centaurs, objects in Pluto’s orbit and some beyond Pluto. In recent years and particularly this year, they are concentrating in your birth sign.

They include Chariklo, Ixion, Amycus, Pholus, Hylonome, Okyrhoe and Quaoar to name a few. This does not include asteroids; it’s a list of slow-moving bodies that operate on what you might call the spiritual level, the healing level or the soul level, and which also tap into cross-cultural movements; they are not ‘personal’ but they have personal manifestations.

They all have mythologies, and they have distinct expressions in astrology — and their presence in your sign, in a word, signals ‘intense’ (not usually in my written vocabulary, but sometimes that’s the word). Overwhelming would be more like it, particularly when another factor (such as the Sun or Moon) gets onto the mutable cross (Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius or Pisces). This focuses what otherwise might be a background level of expression, though for you, it does not take much. [Note, when the Sun is in one of those signs, we tend to focus the Planet Waves blog on this cluster of planets. You can find delineations of some of them at this page on Small World Stories.]

There’s a bit too much here to break it down planet by planet, though there is one group that really stands out: the clustering of a centaur, Chariklo, with Pluto-like Ixion, and two other centaurs — Pholus and Hylonome. This combination is connecting you to two things. One is that it’s a direct point of contact with all of the grief and struggle in the world. It’s almost as if you seem willing to take it on yourself.

Ixion calls out a special theme: the question of morality. In our times, that’s a very difficult issue, isn’t it? In some parts of the population there is the discussion of integrity and the sincere attempt to act in harmony with the greater good. In other parts of the population, there is an increasing cruelty caused by the total abandonment of ethics.

This has been present on the planet through known history, but never as available, encouraged and enabled as it is today. Problems we thought we solved (child slavery) are pandemic. Maybe we got prostitution out of our particular neighborhood, only to have that replaced by human trafficking. Many people who get the death penalty are innocent, and worse yet, few people seem to care. People do all kinds of evil things to their kids, partners, pets, parents, bosses and communities, and it’s all good because everyone else is doing it or you gotta do what you gotta do or whatever BS rationales they spew out.

You know that that’s not really in your nature. You also know it’s not enough for you to go along with the flow and have a good time. If you’re living out your astrology, matters of right and wrong — on the global level, and the personal level — are deeply meaningful to you. So meaningful that in fact you may be taking on the burdens of the world.

I suggest that you involve yourself primarily with correct action on your part. Ask yourself consciously: what is the right thing to do, in any situation in which you find yourself? Really ask that. All these potent planets mean healing opportunity, they mean impact and they mean you have the power to make a lot of karma, for good or for ill.

One aspect of this, by the way, is what you allow others to lead you to do. It’s way too easy for you to be dragged along by the values of others, and make no mistake: this all comes down to values. Pluto in your 2nd house (2nd solar house for Sagittarius Sun, 2nd house by whole-sign houses for Sag rising) is about putting down an anchor into your personal values, and tapping into what is in truth an unstoppable force.

Yet here is something a little weird: if you looked at a conventional astrology chart on the day the Sun ingressed your sign in either 2012 or 2013 (I am using both charts for this reading), you would see, basically, nothing but the Sun. When most astrologers look at your sign, they see nothing special going on; the last big news was that Pluto left in 2009. I will stop short of saying there’s some kind of conspiracy to keep secret what’s happening in your sign, or in the solar system, but it sure does feel that way.

You, however, know by now that something unusual is going on; something lurking behind the pressure that you’re feeling, and perhaps the chaos. These planets may also be manifesting as a colossal identity crisis, but this is no ordinary one. If that’s true, I suggest you think of it in a Sagittarian way: as a quest. Focus your mind. If you’re feeling lost, figure out where you are.

At the moment, it will be challenging to do this outside the context of relationships, since they are so prominent in your life right now, and since you seem to be so invested in them, or at least the concept. Yet if you’re involved in a primary relationship, that presents special challenges, and I suggest you differentiate between what is sometimes called ‘relationship work’ versus what is ‘personal work’.

Much of what we think involves relationships is deeply personal, having nothing to do with relationships. Yet you run some significant risk of confusing the two, and I suggest you set up safeguards against this; working with a therapist would be a good start. You need, in any event, someone who is a specialist in boundaries, and you need to pay attention to where you begin and where someone else ends.

Let’s put it this way: when you explore your consciousness down to the depths of your being, it’s not about anyone but you.

Except When It’s About Your Family

There’s one last point in the Sagittarius cluster that deserves special attention. That is Quaoar. This point is in late Sagittarius and it’s about to cross the Galactic Core (which is, of course, in late Sagittarius). When a point crosses the GC, it comes into emphasis.

What, they didn’t mention Quaoar in school? That’s because it was discovered in 2002 (but I am sure they don’t tell kids about it today either). It was considered such an important discovery that astronomers gave it catalogue number 50,000. They wanted to inform the astronomers of posterity that this was a big one along the way to figuring out the solar system.

Its discovery team named it after the creation god of the Tongva people, who lived in what is now Los Angeles. Their creation myth involved Old Man Sky coming out and shaking his rattles, doing a little dance. He was joined by Mother Earth, who danced around, and one by one members of the tribe would join the dance.

I have three main delineations of Quaoar, which I’ll state here (and which we will be writing about in Planet Waves a lot more this year). Tell me how they fit your life.

1. Your creation myth. What is your version of events in how you got onto the planet, and how we all got here? Everyone has some version of this. Some think it was Adam and Eve; some think space aliens put us here; some think that we were little fish that grew feet. What do you think? What is your sense of your origins, and what is your understanding of your creation within your family?

2. The family pattern as you observe it — ‘the way of your tribe’. What roles do people play, and what role do you have in that mix? What is the ‘family constellation’? Psychology has made great advances understanding the impact of family constellation on how an individual develops. Some theories say we internalize the whole thing in one swallow.

3. The family pattern that was in existence before you personally arrived in the family. This is everything that was going on before you got here, like a dance that had started, and then you joined the dance because that was the thing to do. So the question is, what was the pattern before you arrived, and what did you have to do to include yourself in the dance? Were you even included? Did the people around you have two left feet, and could you even properly call the stuff they were listening to ‘music’? Or do you have the sense that you really belonged there?

These are the questions to ask yourself. Because Quaoar is going to be close to the Galactic Center, you may feel a gradual tug in the direction of your cosmic origins, the sense that you’re part of something much larger, or the desire to connect.

Speaking of Connect: Pluto and Chiron

One way to work with multiple transits through your sign is to consider other transits with the same message, though that’s said in a simpler way. There are two that you have to work with. One is Pluto through your 2nd house (values, resources, self-esteem, self-love and sex in the form of masturbation). The other is Chiron through your 4th house (security base, early family environment, the past, resolution of past matters, father’s side of the family).

Consider this, and consider it a theory of working with the newly discovered points, which are having an orgy in your sign. Pluto sums up the movement of the trans-Neptunian planets. It’s the prototype of that energy. Chiron sums up the movement of the centaur planets. Those are what you have in your sign: trans-Neptunian planets, and centaurs.

Let’s consider these two transits one at a time, and I think you will see some obvious points of connection.

First, Pluto in your 2nd house, which is Capricorn. (Note, it’s your 2nd solar house if you’re Sagittarius Sun and your 2nd house by whole-sign houses if you’re Sag rising). This transit is about cultivating a deep commitment to your independence. Many other transits will come and go while this one burns on (till 2024).

The independence described by this transit is so profound that you may feel daunted by the prospect. You want to relate to others, you want to depend on them, but the evolutionary message with the deepest drive is telling you that you have to start with yourself and that everyone else is, in truth, an extension of your own inner reality.

Pluto is cutting through a lot of past baggage that was given to you by your family, and through other forms of karmic inheritance. Your Capricorn angle is the one that makes you a conservative on the inside. You are freewheeling on the exterior, but deep inside, you have an adherence to the past and its ways that even you find surprising sometimes.

Pluto is saying it’s time to update that; that part of what you’re doing in the process of forging your independence is freeing yourself from the slag of history. The people who came before you lived in a world different from yours. They had different reasons for making the decisions they did, different motives and different expectations of life — none of which came close to envisioning our mile-per-second reality. It’s not that our world is better than theirs, though we know a lot more and we have a lot more potential. It’s merely that it was different, and you need different tools to process your reality.

Part of this independence is about being guided by your own values. That means your own values in relationships as much as anything else. This is critical because you allow your relationships to be so influential — and they are, particularly in this moment. You need to be penetrating to the core of what is true for you, even as you strive so fully to invest yourself into the experience of others.

The second transit is Chiron in Pisces, which is your 4th solar house or 4th house by whole-sign houses. This is your security base — and it is emotional in nature. Here’s yet another way in which the usual sign descriptions of Sagittarius don’t quite add up to reality: you are far more sensitive than you let on. Things must be right with you emotionally or you are not happy. Problem is, you can go on unhappy for quite a while, putting on a happy face and/or engaging your famous optimism for the job, while still struggling internally.

Chiron in Pisces is saying: ground yourself emotionally. Make contact with yourself. Put the emphasis of ‘intensity’ on healing and not on the next adrenaline rush. Focus, focus, focus, inwardly, inwardly, inwardly.

You may be discovering many things about the past that you would change if you could. The key here is not to be in denial of the past, but rather, to affirm it fully and in doing so make friends with it. With Pisces, the key is to stay out of denial. You have Neptune down there as well, which may be leading you to be in a little extra denial — though it could be adding the sense of being filled back up with water where you had run dry in the past.

Chiron will address the denial factor quite well. However, if you feel yourself bouncing back and forth between denial and rude awakenings, that’s the time to take hold of the wheel and guide your life in a different direction. With these transits — all of them, Chiron, Neptune and Pluto — the calling is to go deep, though I never trust what people will think when I say that word. Some people think a five-minute astrology reading is deep. Some think that Oprah is deep. Some think that baseball is the new Shakespeare.

I really do mean deep; stay with your process, your spiritual path, your therapy, your journaling. Stay with yourself. Be aware and remember that you process things emotionally even though you may not want anyone to know that about you. But it’s more true than you think — especially in these years in your life. Here is why.

Saturn in Scorpio through the 12th House

The signs before and after one’s sign are profoundly influential in one’s life. Astrology likes to use the crosses (the signs opposite and square your own), which tends to work well — but I’ve seen over and over again how the adjoining signs reveal deep characteristics of who and what a person is.

I’ve already covered Capricorn, the sign after yours; there is also something special going on in Scorpio, the sign before yours, which means that it’s the 12th house. This is another transit that will take you inward — perhaps more than any other. By the time that Saturn first touches Sagittarius on Dec. 23, 2014, you will be intimate with yourself in a new way.

Transits that are calling you into relationships will give way to the experience of your relationship with yourself. I suggest you not miss any opportunities to get to know yourself deeply despite whoever else you may be getting to know. This is a rare moment when a truly unusual kind of introspection is possible.

If you can commit yourself to this sooner rather than later, you will be able to move many obstacles out of the way of a wave of fresh energy that’s about to enter your life when your ruling planet Jupiter ingresses Cancer in June.

I have written before that “intimacy is introspection that we share.” There is a sense of contact and closeness possible for you right now, but this is nothing compared to what is coming as the year unfolds, and Jupiter joins the other planets in the water signs — Saturn, Chiron and Neptune, along with a diversity of minor points that will accentuate the effect.

Yet the depth that you’re able to go with anyone else cannot exceed the depth that you’re able to go with yourself. If this feels lonely, or isolating, or in any way strange, I suggest that you experience that feeling, and reach out to others who support you in going there. Those are your true friends — the people who encourage you, guide you, and set the example to be close to yourself, no matter how it may influence them personally. Once you understand that your life is about you, you will see how much you have to share with others.

 

Eric also offers birthday readings and other audio reports here.

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