May’s Mutable Resolution — The Tale of Two T-Squares

If you feel conflicted internally, that feeling could manifest conflicts with others. Astrology graphically represents that situation through an aspect called a T-square. Over the course of Wednesday and Thursday, the last two days of May, there will be two significant T-squares. What the two aspects will have in common besides their geometry is that they will each consist of three objects occupying three different mutable signs. Those two mutable T-squares will symbolically demonstrate an important principle, that conflict can be engaged with consciously and creatively, without destruction, through authentic discourse.

We live in times when authentic discourse is rare. Many confine themselves to one pole, hearing only and strictly what they espouse. There is no meaningful polemic within one pole, only stagnation, which is not sustainable. That’s where the mutable signs come in.

Mutable signs turn the cycle of the seasons. A new season begins as the Sun enters a cardinal sign. Following each cardinal period is another which is fixed. You usually feel the new season taking hold with the Sun in a fixed realm. When a season has gone as far as it can go is when you will probably find the Sun in mutable territory, with the weather hinting at a new cycle, a different pattern. That is a challenging time for many people, who feel conflicted between tiring of stagnation and desiring stability. The energy signature of a planet moving in mutable raiment emulates that of the Sun.

There are four mutable signs: Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces. The lines connecting them through the center of the zodiac circle form a cross. In other words, mutable signs either oppose or are at right angles (square) to each other. When objects occupy the same degree in three of the four mutable signs, they compose a T-shaped aspect called a T-square. A T-square consists of two opposed points which have in common a square to the third object.

Oppositions and squares indicate tension. A square usually corresponds to the type of tension you feel with and inside yourself, such as being torn between a need to escape stagnation and a desire for stability. When objects are in opposition on the zodiac it means Earth is between them in space, and that sort of arrangement often takes place when you find yourself in a tense relationship with others. It is thus that a T-square is in fact composed of two types of aspects, merging their symbolism to demonstrate that any conflict you have with another implies a common inner tension that can just as well serve to resolve the conflict as prolong it. A mutable T-square is an indication that resolution through peaceful discourse will turn the wheel and give everybody involved an opportunity for relief from the stagnation of conflict and a chance to start fresh.

One of the two mutable T-squares this week takes place Wednesday. It will find Mercury, halfway through Gemini in less than a week, opposing the mysterious Great Attractor, which has occupied Sagittarius for centuries. While facing off, both Mercury and the Great Attractor will be in a precise, to the degree, square aspect to Mars, which has been oscillating through Virgo since 11-11-11. As gamers like to say, that’s epic. Mercury, archetype of how you know, is confronting a symbol of the unknowable. Both of them are feeling a personal crisis in relationship to what Robert Hand referred to as the “energy planet,” and a matter of relationship it is.

The only thing your mind can truly know is itself, and even that is a lifetime’s work. The other, any other, will always be, at least in part, a mystery. That’s how conflict becomes the path of least resistance. You don’t have to know anything about another person to get in a fight. You do have to divert resources away from fighting and into exchange in order to have a constructive relationship. It’s a matter of consciously coming to terms with your energy and deciding where you want to direct it, which leads us to this week’s other mutable T-square.

Trailing swift Mercury through Gemini is the Sun. It’s a reminder that all of us are indeed approaching another season, another pattern which will require each of us to release that which has gone as far as it can go. We need to embrace a new cycle if we want to continue participating in the world. Between Wednesday and Thursday, the Sun will become part of a T-square with two centaur objects: Chiron expressed through Pisces, and Chariklo lending grace to Sagittarius.

The centaurs of myth were defined by being different. Half human, half steed, they were a link between people and those we consider bestial. Centaur objects are also different, with highly elliptical, steeply inclined orbits that link the outer planets. Chiron was the first such object discovered and Chariklo is the biggest and brightest of the bunch. Both of them orbit between Saturn and Uranus, linking the visible, classical planets with those discovered by science. Most serendipitously, in myth Chiron and Chariklo were wed to each other.

Chiron and Chariklo have been approaching a mutable square for months. Having the Sun join them in a T-square will effectively extend and elaborate on the conversation opened by Mercury, Mars and the Great Attractor, giving us cause to examine what it takes to move beyond conflict to mutual support, and the consequences of not doing so. It comes down to what links us.

It may seem as if each of us is separate and alone. Even an elemental level of self awareness, such as that gained by confronting and acting on internal tensions, makes us conscious of the fact that what we have in common far exceeds any incidental difference. We are all in fact wed to the Earth that sustains us, and by inference, to each other. 

We all come into this world the same way, and we all leave it the same way. Confronting the internal tensions of living in this mutable place is what we have in common. As more and more of us assemble here with the same needs, we will have a choice as to whether the needs we share will be the basis by which we get stuck in the stagnation of conflict or evolve through resolution of what, in fact, are illusory differences that provide no stability at all. If we choose to conflict over what all of us need, existence will not be sustainable for any of us. If each of us can see in our own internal struggles the struggles of the other, the unknowable other will be revealed, but only to the extent that each of us knows ourselves as one with all things.

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