AN AQUARIAN ERA FOR VIRGO | BY ERIC FRANCIS
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The Aquarian Era transits take place in your 6th place (house, whole sign house, solar house). You might think of Aquarius as the sign that represents Virgo energy to Virgo (the 6th sign). The presence of Aquarius on the 6th is much of what people describe when they are talking about Virgo tendencies: the intensity of your mind, your drive to full-on involvement, and most of all, your desire to work with other people in a collaborative way. Well, more than desire. This is fundamental to your nature and it is the destination to which all roads and all transits are guiding you now.
Yours is not the leadership of structured power or corporate authority. It is that which you do by example, and the full willingness to engage any task necessary for serving the greater good that you seek. Your chart is not about letting others do what is necessary; it is about you focusing a purpose and a goal, and working with others to make it happen.
There’s just one slight caution: collaboration includes what happens in person. Aquarius is given to existence on the internet — Zoom meetings and the like. It’s up to you to guide this into direct, incarnated, personal experiences, rather than virtual ones. This is integral to the leadership angle: for many people, actually showing up somewhere is unthinkable. We could remove the ‘somewhere’ for a more accurate statement.
Another term for digital is in silico, which means theoretical. Your life is not theoretical, nor is your work or your talent or your desire to live. Yet the influence of digital is leading people to live in theory, meaning virtual, meaning in silico.
It is time to get real. It is time for all of us to arrive and call ourselves present. You are one of the people who will be leading the way. Let’s work our way to that theme, and first, cover some of the astrology that is influencing your sign and in many ways shaping your experience of life. Please read the Cancer reference reading for details about the Aquarian Era transits that pertain directly to you and your sign.
The Neptune in Pisces Factor
For a long time, you have lived in a world of ambiguity and ambivalence. By that I mean that the sharp distinctions between opposites that in past times defined your awareness have melted into something else: perhaps uncertainty, perhaps a more circumspect view of life, perhaps the ability to take in and honor more points of view than you did in the past.
It is possible that you attributed this to the effects of maturity. Most people mellow as they grow older. Perhaps you attributed the change, if you noticed it, to a world where distinctions are being blurred — between true and false, fact and opinion, real and virtual, liberal and conservative, good and evil — as are differences between sexes, genders and sexual orientations, between self and other, and many other human qualities that used to have sharp contrasts.
Neptune transits can have strange effects, one of which is the blurring quality I’ve just described, and another is a sense of isolation. There can be strange influences on relationships with Neptune in the 7th.
Much of this has the mark of the digital environment, which blurs and flattens existence and makes the once-clear lines more difficult to see. Understanding the digital environment will be a crucial factor in determining who succeeds and survives the Aquarian Era, which is the time of full-digital conditions (ever increasing, in ways that only a science fiction author could have imagined). The primary questions of the Aquarian Era are: who can keep their humanity intact when dealing primarily with robots, and who can preserve their humanity in the face of ever-increasing pressure to become transhuman?
Though there are material ’causes’ to the change in environment, I would propose that any such shift in perception is described by the long-term presence of Neptune in your opposite sign Pisces. This is your 7th place (house, whole sign house or solar house). This transit began 10 years ago, in the spring of 2011. Neptune transits endure, and it can take a while to notice the effects. Sometimes they seem like a flood, though other times they are invisible, like the humidity gradually increasing. They have a way of being self-concealing, and dropping beneath the level of full awareness, which is why I want to start here.
Neptune transits can have strange effects, one of which is the blurring quality I’ve just described, and another is a sense of isolation. There can be strange influences on relationships with Neptune in the 7th, which can include communication challenges of the “we are not understanding one another” type, incidents of deception, and the sensation of being invisible.
Whatever is in the 7th place can color the whole environment that you perceive, meaning what you think of as ‘the world’. The influence of Neptune is deep, wide and pervades everything. It is so deep and so wide and so pervasive that it can be impossible to notice until the effects have reached a tipping point. It never seems to have a point source. Neptune manifests as ‘the way things just are’ more than any other influence (though Pluto is a close second, and the two have more in common than I have ever read in an astrological book or article, one common property being their ability to work by being invisible and below liminality or the level of perception).
(For some background on Neptune, I can recommend two companion articles, one called Parallel Worlds, and another about his consort Salacia.)
What is Real and What is Not?
Neptune demands that you constantly assess and evaluate your perceptions. This is not so in vogue lately. Just like science has blurred the difference between the hypothesis and the final, proven, repeated result of research and investigation, people are skewed when they take their own opinion as actual fully established fact.
There are days when this may drive you mad, particularly with the feeling of not understanding how or why people do this and why society is tolerating it. One of the most annoying things about life, which you cannot really talk about, is how stupid so many people are.
To Virgo, what is real is what can be established by the facts. Among Virgo’s favorite tools are the spreadsheet, the notebook, the internet browsing history, fact-based articles that are both detailed and give both historical context and analysis, and more than anything, a good debate over what is true and what is not. Look at everything and have that debate with yourself. If you find yourself believing something, note the way that your mental and intuitive processes may have been bypassed.
Keep your pencil sharp, and do not be deterred by what people believe. Recognize when you believe something versus when you know it.
You can engage in argument if you feel your views are respected in that process — that is, if the person you’re engaging actually cares enough to understand your point of view. You are more likely to get your ego out of the way and accept an alternative view, or being wrong, if someone demonstrates understanding and then says, here, look at this and tell me what you think. (That means presenting you with some tidy figures, several studies, or a new way of reasoning). It is true that you can be arbitrary, but you can just as easily get over yourself.
It will be worth a paragraph to share some contrasts between the two Mercury-ruled signs, Gemini and your own. Through the lens of Gemini, the differences and distinctions are often seen as clear, binary choices, where there is a dialog between the possibilities. Through the lens of Virgo we enter the space of full integration of opposites. There is the possibility of more gray area. (This is in a way similar to Sagittarius, though Virgo is more grounded on the intellectual plane and Sagittarius on the spiritual. Remember that the entire mutable cross works together as one entity, assisting integration work in a diversity of ways that are all related.)
For Virgo, intellect and reason are spiritual activities. Virgo is a sign of the Second Ray, the names of which include The Giver of Wisdom, The Radiance in the Form and The Master Builder. In this respect, I would propose your path of initiation is about honoring reason, intellect, documentation and teaching of the basics. Virgo is famous for being about the details, which I would say are the details of thought. While the mind is often confused with the ego, they are different things. The mind is our distinctly human ability to think in abstractions.
As a treat to yourself, you might take up some subject such as logic, linguistics, physics or mathematics. Look up one word a day in the Etymology Online Dictionary. (This is not an ad for Amazon, though their making the Great Courses series available for free is one of the greatest things to ever happen on the internet.)
With Pisces as your opposite sign, however, you know there is another way to see existence. Pisces can blur distinctions, and so too can Neptune in a more concentrated way. It is raining down on your mind from your opposite sign and house. This has its positive moments; Neptune can make a world of beauty rise before your eyes — beauty which does not need to be analyzed or explained. Neptune can also rain on your painting, though if you can see the beauty in that, you gain a lot. (From Kate Bush: So all the colors run / see what they have become / a wonderful sunset.) Virgo includes Pisces inherently, and so it includes your ability to allow yourself to be informed by beauty and intuition.
However, you will not rest until the numbers add up — and you are currently living in an environment where people find that threatening. J.P. Sears skewered this mentality beautifully in his quip, “The conspiracy theory known as a timeline.”
Therefore, keep your pencil sharp, and do not be deterred by what people believe. Recognize when you believe something versus when you know it. The planetary influence that most accurately describes Virgo is Chiron, which thrives on documentation, devotion to service, one-on-one teaching, and the development of new methods of healing and thought.
You may also find yourself increasingly confronted with the choice between the fantasy of something (total control), or the reality of something (little to no control). Remember that the appeal of fantasy is you can make it do whatever you want.
Under the influence of Neptune, it can seem that your relationships have no special definition and you cannot tell who is who and what is what. You are never really sure why someone is in your life. It would help to merely acknowledge that they are. There is something creative about not knowing why: you have the ability to suspend pre-judgment, though then you must respond with the Virgo/Chiron quality of careful discernment. Note the behaviors of others and where they depart from the press release. Note the same in yourself.
You prefer that which can be translated into pencil and pad, ink and paper, the three-column comparison, the spreadsheet, the executive summary that you commit to as your current perception of events. Honor this quality of your mind and you will have a hedge against the current insanity of our world. Know when you do not know — and admit when you do.
A Note about Jupiter in Pisces
Presently as of this writing in spring 2021, Jupiter is dancing back and forth between Aquarius and Pisces. This is helping you get some perspective on all that has influenced you during the Neptune in Pisces era. You might say that Jupiter is offering you another interpretation of events, or the ability to see something that you have been missing due to the invisible nature of Neptune.
Jupiter, the classical ruler of Pisces, is much more tangible than its modern counterpart, and since it presents options, it is more given to action. So you may be feeling some relief from the sublime gaslighting of Neptune. It will help if you recognize potential experiences you may choose when they arise, do some experimenting with them.
In late July 2021, Jupiter backs into Aquarius for the rest of the year, then re-enters Pisces in the beginning of 2022. This sequence of events will keep your environment moving and refresh the waters like the tide that ebbs and floods. (Neptune does not have that feeling in quite the same way; it’s more like the tides you cannot notice because you’re out in the middle of the ocean.)
Jupiter in Pisces is building toward a world-event, which is its conjunction to Neptune on April 12, 2022. Such major conjunctions both shift and reveal the zeitgeist. Jupiter is about knowledge and Neptune is more about denial. There are a number of ways to put those two influences together. My sense is that this conjunction is about noticing the obvious that seemed to elude awareness previously. Yet think of this on a massive scale. There are other possibilities; though bear in mind that Jupiter often describes what is fashionable. Will that be the knowledge and wisdom angle of Jupiter, or the denial and deception angle of Neptune?
That may depend upon who you are, and how you establish your relationship to the truth. You may also find yourself increasingly confronted with the choice between the fantasy of something (total control), or the reality of something (little to no control). Remember that the appeal of fantasy is you can make it do whatever you want. The appeal of physical reality is that you don’t really know what is going to happen or how it’s going to work out. Some see that as a plus.
Apropos of Chiron: Aries in the 8th Place
Let’s develop the role of Chiron for you now. The 7th place is about relationships generally, and the environment you perceive, generally. The 7th lacks specificity (especially for you now, under the dual influence of Neptune and Pisces). There is another relationship house, the 8th, which is an extension of the 7th and in my view, presents us with one of the most significant and interesting facts about Virgo (I have covered this in many recent Astrology Studio readings and others, if you want additional details and depth). Here is the basic shape of things.
The placement of the sign Aries is one of the defining factors of any sign. This is because Aries turns the key to consciousness. It is the spark that sets the fire of awareness. In many ways it precedes normal waking consciousness. It’s like awakening in the midst of the dream, and then exploring the actualization of self: of bringing your sense of being, presence and awareness into manifestation.
For the past three years, Chiron has been in Aries, and it has begun to change this dynamic. It is serving to radically awaken you within your situations. Though this has happened before, what you may be seeing is that the lose yourself / find yourself cycle is something you need to step out of.
The 8th place (house, solar house, whole sign house — it is all the same thing) is the consummation of what commences in the 7th: the contract, the agreement, the merger, the investment, the point of tangible contact where we know exactly who is party to the agreement.)
The 8th is where people tend to get fully involved in their partnerships, of many different kinds. With Aries here, the tendency of Virgo is to invest oneself totally in partnerships and the concept of the partnership, to the degree where you can get lost there. People close to you may have no concept the extent to which this is true.
Aries 8th is profound identification with the other as a core concept of relationship. But it contains its opposite in a rather active way: Aries always comes with the experience of self-actualization. So the cycle is to lose yourself in relationship, and then find yourself, which has potentially led to your leaving many relationships when you decide they do not fit who you are.
For the past three years, Chiron has been in Aries, and it has begun to change this dynamic. It is serving to radically awaken you within your situations. Though this has happened before, what you may be seeing is that the lose yourself / find yourself cycle is something you need to step out of. The alternative to this would be to enter your relationships from a found, meaning fully self-aware place, and not use them as a forum for self-discovery so much as a forum for exchange, sharing and the creation of new experiences.
The 8th house has two primary tendencies: one is to turn people into commodities by establishing a cash value (bride price or dowry). The other is to keep things secret. Chiron is undoing the tendency to turn yourself or anyone into something that can be transacted. And it is doing its part to reveal all that is usually spoken of only in whispers, or assumed, or avoided. Chiron exposes what is really going on in ways that can be reckoned and accounted for. In the case of the 8th, this is about one thing, mainly: how you work out being yourself in the experience of being in relationship. If we skip over the “lose yourself” part — which is in a sense bypassing the issue of being yourself — you enter your situations with more integrity, from the standpoint of your integrated self.
This is building to a major event that takes place in May 2025 through March 2026: Chiron conjunct Eris in Aries. This is one of the stand-out events of the Aquarian Era.
Eris in Aries dates back to around 1926, at the dawn of the age of radio and therefore electrical mass media. It has been transiting your 8th since long before you were born. I’ve written much about this transit. Check the Aries reference reading from INTELLIGENCE and also my short book about Eris, Facets and Fragments of Self.
To my perception, we live in a dangerous time when standing up and being yourself is considered threatening behavior. This includes questioning the prevailing mythology of our times, including any venerated religious figure.
On the prior topic of blurring distinctions, Eris in Aries has all but erased that between the individual and the group. This is called being tribalized. This is what electrical media do. We are all about being in tribes these days (this emerged in full-force in the 1960s, with society full-throttle under the influence of television). Today, everything is divided into a ‘community’, which means tribal identity. If something is deemed not to be tribal enough, it is not acceptable. Tribes wage war on one another, based on perceived threats.
And more than anything, tribes have zero tolerance for individuality for its own sake. In an actual tribe, the chief, his daughter, maybe his favorite wife, the shaman and the chief warrior can have some claim to individuality. Everyone else is just another plebe, without identity or status. This condition would usually verge on intolerable in literate Western civilization, however, as the new digital literacy has taken over, most people are content not only to blend in but to not do anything that could get them kicked out of the group.
Chiron however is providing an alternative thesis. While identity politics as we think of them today had their birth during the last run of Chiron in Aries (starting in the late 1960s), the influence of Chiron can flip that entirely, if a person is willing to engage their process of self-actualization (of which there was plenty during the last Chiron in Aries cycle). However, we are now under full digital conditions and this is making it difficult to even think in terms of a self: being one, having one, whatever.
To my perception, we live in a dangerous time when standing up and being yourself is considered threatening behavior. This includes questioning the prevailing mythology of our times, including any venerated religious figure. Yet you are too much of an iconoclast to brook this for very long. Part of the stupidity that irritates you so is the refusal of so many people to think for themselves, or worse, to use conformity as a claim to being totally original.
Chiron conjunct Eris is an explosion of consciousness waiting to happen.
For you, this is about observing the need you have to self-actualize through sexual experience and through relationship experience and not confuse the two. Sex without some concept of commitment (meaning a form of marriage) is still considered a sin. Yet it’s not a sin to be alive, to breathe, to feel and to desire. And to explore your desires, you do not need to offer yourself into any form of slavery. If you experience any guilt around this, you have discovered a place where you can claim back another piece of yourself.
Chiron conjunct Eris seems to be four years in the future, as a known and inevitable event, but it can be tapped into right now. It is happening now, as both planets are in the same sign. The simplest way to describe this conjunction is to say that it’s about liberating yourself from the nearly compulsive impulse of society to demand that everyone pretend to think the same way, and where every human transaction is another opportunity to give yourself up.
How do you know where you stand on these matters? Well, if you agree too much with others, I suggest you be suspicious about whether you are really using your discernment. Once you are in possession of your own views, you’re not going to agree with many people on many issues. And you will be highly unlikely to accept someone’s idea of who you are or who you should be.
Aquarius for Virgo in the Aquarian Era
The primary energetic property of Aquarius is to create patterns. This includes social patterns, mental patterns, and concepts and archetypes that become real. Much of this is driven by technological ‘advance’. Each new version of society that we experience has its primary influence in the prevailing medium of the time, and for us, this is digital. The prevailing medium ripples out and influences everyone and everything whether they directly indulge or not. Nobody escapes the influence of the internet by not using it. The tide has risen and we all float, swim or drown.
In a way similar to Chiron in Aries, the pattern-forming and (therefore) group-defining influence of Aquarius contains its opposite. Aquarius is always dancing on the line of where the group meets the individual and where the individual meets the group. So too is Aries. (I describe these parallels in the Aries reading for INTELLIGENCE).
There is much in your chart about setting boundaries between self and other. This implies turning knowing who you are, or the quest for who you are, into an art form.
Aquarius is now under the influence of Saturn, the planet that rules the sign we are all getting the full experience of. For you this is tremendously fortunate, though there are a couple of conditions, one of which is that you take care of your health and maintain a sane level of activity and only modest stress.
Saturn is however the original ‘get it done’ influence. And it’s also the original ‘this calls for patience’ influence. So getting it done requires patience, and if you’re not feeling good, you’re not going to be as effective.
The primary influence of Saturn is to put a boundary between you and peer pressure, brainwashing, influencers, group think and the rest of what passes for collective activity. In a similar way as Chiron in Aries is awakening you to your need to be an individual in your relationships and moreover enter your relationships as an individual, Saturn in Aquarius is reminding you (and indeed enforcing) your need to be in any group situation as an individual. This alone is a leadership factor. It’s also your hedge against getting dragged into some new cult, as another one shows up about every five minutes these days. This includes the cult of individuality.
There is much in your chart about setting boundaries between self and other. This implies turning knowing who you are, or the quest for who you are, into an art form. If you don’t do this, you can be sure that someone will try to do this for you, which is the equivalent of turning you into something like a product, an experimental subject, or a ratepayer — not a person. It’s critical that you build and learn how to manage this boundary while you have the help of Saturn, because the next major thing to arrive will be Pluto.
Please read the Aquarian Era reading for Cancer for additional details about Pluto in Aquarius that pertain directly to you and will give you a detailed description of the influence of Pluto, which has many facets and much background. The core theme is preserving your humanity, in the face of numerous influences to give yourself up.
The 6th Place: Work and Wellbeing
Pluto in Aquarius takes place in the work and wellbeing angle of your chart. While the 6th is not considered especially important by traditional astrology, it’s very important in our time because we spend most of our time there. It’s true that most of what the majority of people do is to work, though now we are being called to awaken to concepts like correct livelihood, service, and staying awake in the midst of all of this technology.
The 6th describes medical issues, and under the influence of Aquarius and digital technology, this has become a more frightening subject than ever. Ten years ago we were discussing universal health care. Today we are discussing universal acceptance of one vaccine against a virus that has never been proven to exist. Even if there is a virus and a syndrome, we seem to have forgot that there is much more to health than an injection that its manufacturer describes as a computer application or operating system.
Summing up six years of studying the internet with the guidance of the McLuhans in a few sentences, here is the issue. New technology extends the nervous system. Imagine that a TV camera pulls your eyes out of your head and takes you wherever it goes.
Part of how we forgot what we really need is the influence of digital inducing a combination of mass hysteria, mass hallucination and mass amnesia. Saturn in Aquarius is calling on you to wake up and remember: how to take care of yourself, what you need to do, and your role in the community of teaching and taking care of others.
Where Pluto is concerned, the most important issue is understanding what it means to give away your power and what it means to keep it, use it, and make it work for you. This is the central theme of Pluto in most of its forms. There is also the matter of surrender; this transit is going to happen. Society is already changing fast and this is going to accelerate the process in some ways that will be disturbing to anyone who is paying attention. The easiest way to not be disturbed will be to tune out. And that is the nature of the problem.
Summing up six years of studying the internet with the guidance of the McLuhans in a few sentences, here is the issue. New technology extends the nervous system. Imagine that a TV camera pulls your eyes out of your head and takes you wherever it goes.
At first this is really exciting, because your senses are enhanced and you seem to have magical powers. But then it quickly becomes overwhelming, and exhausting so the ‘natural’ response is to numb out. That is not an appropriate response for anyone — and least of all for you. The effect is to turn society into a mass of zombies who will do anything they are told. You may not see it that way, but then, you just might if you started questioning the assumptions under which nearly everyone is proceeding. That might not be popular but that is not your role. Your role is to be real, to question, and to ensure that you align your perception with discernment. You may be told you’re a dangerous person doing this. And that may be true, though not in the manner that the speaker intends. If you feel dangerous, you might ask yourself why that is.
We came into this world to be humans, not to give up our humanity. Much of what it means to be human is to do meaningful work, to take care of ourselves, to help one another, and by extension, to take care of our planet.
The robots are taking over. The people who drive the robots are out of control and have lost control of what they have made. You are the one who must draw a line around yourself and say where this ends: with you. And that is where you and your life truly begin.