As mentioned yesterday on Planet Waves, there is a configuration of tense aspects between the Sun and several powerful, slow-moving outer planets. Pholus is involved, intensifying the sensation that the Obama administration’s drive to bomb Syria could spin out of control, while Ixion seems to represent the lack of ethics in the whole proposed bombing campaign. (As always, watch your personal life for situations with these themes.) One potential saving grace is that the Sun is involved: we are conscious of all of this, which means we can choose to work with it constructively.
Chaos, across the way in Gemini, seems to speak to the dual forms of perceived chaos hanging in the balance of our decisions in these days. There’s the chaos of doing nothing and watching brutality unfold (or the seeming political chaos in the U.S. as left and right rally against this new war) and the chaos of launching an attack that we know full well could easily grow into something far beyond our fears.
Pholus and Ixion, as Eric noted yesterday, are minor planets closer to Pluto in their strength — though we are only just now getting acquainted with them astrologically speaking. Being centaurs, they speak to how our humanity and our ‘lower’ or darker halves tread an often-uneasy balance with each other.
In particular, Pholus and Ixion ask us to consider the ways in which our actions can reach much further than we anticipate — influencing future generations and groups of people we have never met. Often they show up in charts representing the shadow material, baggage and patterns we’ve inherited from ancestors.
When we deal with Pholus and Ixion directly, they call ‘bullshit’ on our tendencies to tell ourselves that we can ‘get away with it’, or that ‘it will only be a little’ or that ‘it will turn out differently this time’.
It works this way on the most internal, personal levels and also the largest collective, cultural or political scales. Consider this, from a recent commentary on Spiegal Online International:
“In the coming days the United States and other countries will make a decision on the use of military force against Syria. The consequences of this decision will affect not only the Assad regime loyalists but also the foot soldiers manning bunkers, barracks, and installations across the country. For the vast majority of Syria’s conscripted soldiers, military service amounts to a brutal prison sentence of unknown length now that the war has extended service periods indefinitely. … many are draftees with no ideological sympathy for the regime and are merely following orders to survive.”
Our consciousness, represented by the Sun in Virgo, is grappling with these tensions in a rather unstable configuration: a T-square. It’s kind of like a three-legged table, just waiting for something to come along and fill in the missing leg.
Pisces is the open sign. It could be that without any major planets applying to the T-square, it’s up to us to supply the imagination, the intuition and the creative ability to hold space for duality — allowing a third option to emerge.
I love this website and how you guys apply astrology to conspiracy topics! I would love to add one thing about Ixion and Pholus, as I’ve been researching about those two for quite a while now: Ixion is NOT a Kentaur! Ixion astronomically is a Plutino, as you can also see here on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28978_Ixion
Mythologically Ixion is considered the father or – in other versions the forefather – of Pholus and other Kentaurs (with the important exeption of Chiron, whose father was Chronos!), so here we have a father/son story included from my perspective as well!
Keep up the great inspiring work, guys! Thanks and love from Bolivia!
And I love the conversation about creativity and chaos, and your marvellous image, Greenstar “Who says you can’t fuse glass and spider’s webs together?” Yeah!
….It encourages me to strengthen my own practice (which involves sittung still for extended periods), to go about it with more vigour and determination, which often gets lost in the chaos of the world and hectic, every day life. Thank you.
Yes. Thank you for this truly wonderful comment,wandering_yeti.
Methinks it would have been better for me to post the article that was published today at the BBC website regarding the report on the study of men in Asia who have admitted to rape here instead of in a different thread.
For those who missed it:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-24021573
Thank you Miss S…. truer words were never spoken. As a fellow artist I recognize the same struggle within my own heart and art. Sometimes we can’t and don’t see how the pieces will ever fit together but our job as artists is to just get in there and figure out a way to MAKE them fit. It is in the incongruity, the recklessness, the impossiblity of the dare itself that break-thrus emerge. Where is it written that I can’t sew sheet metal to lace? Who says you can’t fuse glass and spider’s webs together? I don’t care if the “rules” say no, artists are here to find a work around….to show the world a vision so rule-breaking that the doors of perception which hang in the frame of the safe and predictable are blown off their hinges and we walk into a whole new landscape….just by viewing the impossible piece that could not be fitted together yet somehow now IS…. thanks to a willing and brave artist.
Thank you for this brilliant inspiration… you’ve helped me more than you know!
I am soooooooooo waiting for an alternative, a third option or a fourth or an umpteenth one, something that gets us humans awakened and creative to the orchestrated chaos of our times. I ponder. I think. I pray. But, somehow, like Miss S’ pieces that can’t quite be put together, I am having a hard time imagining what alternative or option could illuminate a path, a way beyond this insanity where the rule is that if most of us are kept in fear (and in debt) we will do nothing to change what is happening and how we are treated.
We do have astrology to give us clues on patterns. And right now the needle has been blown off the “PI” (Pholus-Ixion) bullshit meter. I mean, “it will turn out differently this time” – really? Isn’t that core of the famous Einstein definition of insanity “doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result”???
“I just came to the realization that the collective sense of chaos and subsequent fear IS what needs to be addressed creatively.” Thank you, Miss S – this is an arrow pointing in a better direction. It is now time for all of us to think differently than we have been conditioned, yea verily, to do something more than think. Create. Ah, yes, create a different world. Be creative in deconditioning our “thinking.” Creatively deprogram ourselves.
And above all. . .make the creativity known. Whatever it is that we may creatively solve or resolve, it won’t be on the evening news as it may have been during the Uranus-Pluto conjunction Virgo forty plus years ago. Now we don’t necessarily have to rely on the established media to tell us “all the news that is fit” for whatever. We have other means of communication, far more instant.
So, no more low lying sojourns. Time to get the pieces together, at least I’m going to try.
Thank you, Amanda and thank you, Miss S, and Wandering Yeti: great messages.
Jann Kinz
Amanda: Thank you for perceiving some things which are very difficult to perceive and then expressing them in heroically lucid manner to benefit all of us.
wandering_yeti: Truer words were never written. You nailed it utterly. Thank you so very much.
Neptune has a huge orb of influence, seeping into the cracks of anything near an angle to it. My focus has continued to be martial arts. The internal kind. Neptune becomes the dissolving fluid that frees the human from bondage to ghosts. Problem is that it takes the discipline to stand still for extended periods so very few folk can access the goodies. Nevertheless, I feel that it’s not merely naval gazing to calm my vibration and strengthen my root. Every human who can relax without collapsing reduces the volume on the cacophony of voices screaming in pain on planet Earth.
miss S — brilliantly put. thank you for contributing your personal astrology and artistic process/struggle as the perfect illustration. now: go make that art! 🙂 it sounds like you’ve found the perfect key for a lock that seemed to keep changing shape. i love the idea that the chaos is the thing that has been begging you to give voice to it, to bring it to light in a work of artistic creation that perhaps isn’t *supposed* to be about “everything neatly fitting together” or “making sense.”
I love this. I had to laugh; my natal sun is that missing leg. Sure, I would like to influence future generations, and yes, I would like to fully engage and not hold back. Yet it is the feeling of chaos that often holds me back. I grapple with these tensions both in a subconscious and conscious way. The struggle is always just below the surface. It seems with my natal sun across the way, the missing leg is saying, ‘Engage. Supply the imagination, the intuition and creative ability.’ But what does that mean? I can see that if I do not, the chaos remains in the unstable tension mix. When the final leg is engaged, it becomes a cross, a symbol of connection, a plus sign, adding and connecting the dimensions.
The thing that lies under the surface regarding world news is fear. The great interrupter. This is important to address because with the ever-constant fear residing in the wings, it is hard to walk on stage in our lives and live up to our full potential. And yet that is the exact thing we need to do. The temptation to lay low is strong. It is a survival instinct. When we perceive chaos, our instincts tell us to hide and watch, so we can discern whether to fight or flee.
The answer is neither fight nor flee nor lay low. Another option requires a bold step to make art that addresses the underlying trauma which is this assault on our sense of safety. We need to actively create to heal a collective sense that there is no order, no structure, no safety and the idea that we live in the context of powerlessness.
But ironically, it is in the context of this sense of chaos that the artist in me emerges and puts its maternal hand up and says, ‘Enough. Stop fretting and walk into the studio and make art out of it. Recycle it. Make something beautiful out of it. Turn the fear into love, somehow, engage it and transform it. For years now, I have had a clear imperative to make art and yet the pieces of it lay on my studio floor. It often feels like there is nothing that gels it together. I love this section I fashioned and that one; I can see how this piece goes with that piece, but I cannot for the life of me put them together. Then I think, well maybe when my life is more stable, less busy, more secure, I will be able to put the pieces together and make it work creatively.
I just came to the realization that the collective sense of chaos and subsequent fear IS what needs to be addressed creatively. The light of the Sun needs to shine on it. This fear is the collateral damage that we have sustained that keeps us from being fully functional human beings and living boldly. The instinct to lay low is not okay because I teach my children and their children to do the same. I end up teaching them to give into, hold on to and honor fear rather than address it and transform it. I need to move beyond instinct, move into intention and get up and start creating because “the opposite of war isn’t peace; it’s creation.”