When retrograde Mercury makes its brief Pisces conjunction to Venus while tomorrow flows into Thursday, it will symbolize a time when you can make effective personal contact with history and the world. The nature and cycles of Mercury and Venus will make it personal. What will make it historical is the astrology you are in the midst of and how it correlates to what is going on in the world at large.
Mercury and Venus (along with the Sun, Moon and Mars) are foremost among the objects considered to be “personal planets” by astrologers. It has to do with how the apparent motion of those objects compare to the cycles and length of your life.
The cycles of your life are probably synchronized with the Earth’s rotation and it’s orbit around the Sun. One full rotation of the Earth is a daily cycle of about 24 hours. After the Earth has completed a full circuit around the Sun, a year has elapsed.
During the course of a day, the Sun appears to move from East to West. During the course of a year, the Sun’s risings and settings move from extreme south (at the Capricorn Solstice) to extreme north (at the Cancer Solstice) and back again. Those apparent solar motions are the standard for the cycles your life. They are also the template for defining a personal planet.
The solar cycles repeat many times in your life. That is also how a “personal planet” is defined. All objects in the personal category complete a full circuit of the 12 signs frequently. During the probable course of your lifetime, even Mars (the personal planet of slowest apparent motion) will have circled the zodiac more times than you have fingers and toes.
Just as personal as fingers and toes are the life events that synchronize with the personal planets. When two such objects make contact in the same degree of the same sign, it probably means that two or more of the cycles in your life, symbolized by the position and nature of the objects involved, are coming together as well.
When a conjunction of personal planets forms an aspect to slower-moving objects, it implies that you are also making personal contact with the longer cycles of history, and living in a moment when what you do, or don’t do, is actually making history. It all begins in the most personal of places, inside your mind.
Mercury represents your mind and what it does. Its routine cycle of three retrogrades per year probably corresponds to how often you are compelled to devote significant time and effort to review, reiterate or reevaluate how and what you think and communicate. Many of our thoughts and most of our communications indicate personal values.
Personal values correspond to the nature of Venus. When it comes to values, people usually get very passionate. Since Pisces is where Venus is exalted, it is an especially good time for such expressions. The Pisces conjunction of Mercury and Venus at the juncture of tomorrow and Thursday will be brief, but the aspects it will make indicate that what is coming together for you in passionate reappraisal is also coming together on a much bigger and longer scale.
In the handful of hours during which Mercury and Pisces conjoin, both will be in a precise water trine to Saturn’s Scorpio placement. Saturn takes nearly 30 years to complete a circuit of the 12 signs, and therefore does not correspond to frequently recurring life cycles. Rather, Saturn represents the long-term endeavors to which many devote their lives. Those endeavors, like career and family, define who you are for those who never spend much time with you, or even meet you at all.
To work with Saturn’s cycles is to create your own legacy. The fact that the ringed one is also retrograde right now indicates that the passionate reappraisal implied by the Mercury-Venus conjunction is, as a water trine aspect represents, flowing into a much longer stream of events that are reaching a critical juncture of their own. The applicable image is tributaries of karma coming together to define the course of not only your lifetime, but generations to come. That’s where Pluto comes in.
Pluto takes about two and a half centuries to complete its own circuit of the zodiac. Its cycles correspond to the development and decay of institutions and systems that define entire cultures, empires and nations. In the moment Mercury merges with Venus, both of those personal planets will be in a sextile to Pluto’s enduring and earthly Capricorn position. That sextile aspect indicates that your karma this week includes a contribution to history itself.
Trine aspects effortlessly conduct a flow of energy through the symbolic medium of a single element. Sextile aspects, on the other hand, contribute the support of one element with a compatible other, manifesting in a synthesis that no one element can achieve alone.
Whatever your passions and thoughts combine to express when Mercury and Venus merge will add solvent to the slurry of Capricorn concrete that is slowly manifesting with Pluto’s apparent motion. If you want your contribution to matter, and if you want your contact with the cycles of history to correspond with your ideals and values, you would do best to ‘do’ consciously. That begins with what you think of your own value.
Most people are conditioned to undervalue themselves. If you are among them, this week is a chance to change yourself and change the world in the process. You can bet that those of the so-called one percent who are flush with traditional forms of value, like currency and power, are even now working to set the world in stone according their self-image for centuries to come. It would be easy for you to let the cycles of your life slip by to either support the efforts of the one percent or just let it happen. That, however, does not have to be the case, and the alternative does not have to be difficult.
If you value yourself, and people like yourself, people who are passionate about values that money cannot buy, people who think that any and all of us can be the agents, rather than the subjects, of cycle and change, you can do something simple and easy this week. You can make your legacy different from those who have gone before you. You can transform the shape of the world for those who follow you. You can simply and easily change your own mind about something you buy, and be an example for others to do the same.
You can pick one thing that you have been buying your whole life because those who have gone before you also bought it, and refuse to buy it any more. It could be a toxic food. It could be gasoline. It could be any number of things, or even non-things, like an idea. Start as small as you feel yourself to be, but start. When this week brings you into personal contact with what is so much bigger, you will see that it makes a difference.
It will be a difference of something left on the shelf, or a path no longer taken, or a place you no longer show your face. It can and will be something you, and others, will see. When that happens, you will have shown yourself and others that there is no such thing as too small to make a difference so long as you live and breathe. That is how to make personal contact with posterity and change the world in the process. There is no time like the present. There is nobody better than you.
Offered In Service
Len is available for astrology readings. You can contact him at lenwallick [at] gmail [dot] com.
There is a beautiful triangle minor tonight (in france) with Saturn Scorpio, Moon and Pluto and mercury Pluto which increases the effect of the communication and the opportunities, thanks Len for this fabulous shares
Len and Be (and all of you) – I have never been more blessed than in this moment.
Thank you.
aword,
I have this notion that native Pisceans are a little more in touch with their inner hero than other sun signs, you know, the “no boundries” thing. To me “Something Big” could stem from a Jupiter (Sagittarius), or Leo (Sun), or Pisces (Neptune) influence, with differing motivations. When I was very young, probably around the 4th grade or so, I had a re-occuring dream where I would be standing on the corner of our front porch (very tiny) and “the devil” (unseen) told me I could “save” any of the people that would pass before me, as long as they could fit in my (small) house. Then people I had known would come “up” from the ground and if I chose them they would enter my front door. I chose them all. I was afraid my house (very packed) would run out of space, and then what! It was an unpleasant dream to wake from; full of fear, and I don’t know why it happened when it happened, nor did I understand it. Looking back, I guess the Unconscious gets through to young children (and native Pisceans) more easily than it does typical adults. A need to accomplish something huge could be the response to feeling so connected to other people, especially those with tragic stories.
There are very few among us who accomplish our heroism in one fell swoop (or one swell foop!); we usually do it incrementally, like you say. I would imagine it would be very trying on a body to accomplish something HUGE all at one time. Considering your (our) fragility, it is a blessing there are only a few famous heros, otherwise who would be left to admire them? Your words of encouragement to your fellow commenters have, for years, had an accumulative effect on the world, a positive one. I don’t doubt for a moment you have already done your fair share of heroism, and that’s the truth!
be
Amanda: Thank you for the link and exciting news about grassroots radio access. You are an authentic (and deeply appreciated) hero once again. And yes, our our independent, but serendipitously parallel efforts have team-tackled the astrology once again – thank you!
be: You are very kind to include your generous praise in with your profound insights. Thank you so much for giving us a description, both accurate and profound, of our moment in both astrology and evolution. The threads evocative of how physics is working to find the string to unite events with phenomena. The robot metaphor to explore where we are on the brink of both understanding our own minds better and fostering nascent forms of mind into existence. Most of all helping us to be aware that the need for healing is within the power of every human to meet halfway. Wow, be, you really gave us a State of the World to take to heart.
aword: Thank you for eloquently extending be’s string of thought. i’m in awe.
Strawberry: Your words make me proud to stand under the same sky with you. Your coming out humbles me and inspires me, as i am sure it does for many others Thank you.
Mia: Actually, yes, you were a significant part of the inspiration. It gives me joy to know that you found my service to be in kind. Thank you for confirming the circle had been closed. May the cycle of reciprocation continue.
Len,
Great article. I have been feeling my Venus in Pisces loud and clear since the Sun moved into Pisces. It is inspiring me on multiple fronts.
You must have been thinking of me when you wrote it!
Mia
speaking of standing for things, i thought i’d post this here, in case anyone is feeling passionate about independent journalism today, courtesy of Democracy Now:
“The independent media broadcast Free Speech Radio News has issued an appeal for donations amidst a financial crisis threatening its closure. Founded 12 years ago, Free Speech Radio News has grown into a daily grassroots newscast with more than 200 freelance correspondents spread across the globe. It airs on more than 100 Pacifica and community radio stations, bringing local voices from global stories to airwaves across the country. FSRN says it will be forced to cease operations next week unless it receives urgent help. It’s asking for support through its website.”
this is the FSRN website:
http://fsrnorg.dreamhosters.com/thetallnathan/donate-now.html
What I pledge to no longer “buy” or go along with in any way is the common fallacy that physical health and emotional pain are anything short of intimately related. In fact, all forms of separation and the competition they breed shall henceforth be nixed from my diet. (I don’t even intend to wait til Wednesday night 😉
With all of these 11s focusing the grand earth trine between Pluto and my Ceres & MC, it’s time to get serious about who I am. And exactly who it is that I no longer will be. Call it my “coming out,” if you will.
Thank you, Len. Thank you, Be. Be, you have compelled me to spout off about something related that I have had great difficulty getting a grasp of (lifelong) and will probably forever be “learning” – which stems no doubt, from a natal Jupiter thing; I have a need to accomplish HUGE. I need to save the world in one large step. I have pressing need to ‘do it all’ Now.
Reality, however – (ah! it’s a Jupiter/Neptune thing!) says that One “Small” Step IS one giant leap. They are the same. Just as there is no such thing as time, there is no such thing as distance. One Step At A Time is all it takes. (We are all here, together, now.)
Thank you for offering the daily “small” – yet huge – steps that you offer and that have incrementally brought me here, with all of you, to this place, now.
We are blessed to live in a time when astrology is so available to so many, and the knowledge gleaned from astrology is provided to us through so many channels. But only here, at PW can we get the kind of astrology provided by you Len Wallick. We live in a time when there is so much remarkable and meaningful astrology taking place, and it is moving so fast, that even one devoted to the study of astrology can absorb only so much at any one time. If we could just take it all in, all of us, this transition we are plowing through, this revolution of evolution coming at us at warp speed, it would not be quite so mind boggling.
From the many conjunctions taking place in Pisces right now, who else could pick the very threads that make all the other threads unknot so we begin to see what patterns are possible? Not just the threads that make up our personal existence but how our personal threads combine into a tapestry of many other personal existences, that, when taken in as a whole, reveals an almost magical, nay divine creation never seen before. If we were robots programmed with specific instructions, maybe it could happen. Someday. But we are human beings who think and feel and do as our spirit guides us. Or not.
Maybe robots is the wrong image. Maybe gods or goddesses could do better than we. Maybe not that even; maybe just better human beings, more evolved from where we are now, could come together and create divine things. If we all can find that something within us that allows us to see the threads that others haven’t spotted so clearly, and then share it with the others so that they too can benefit, it could happen. It is said that we all have the divine spark within us but often we need to be guided to find it. We need to be conscious in order to understand it when we find it, and today our teacher Len provides some clues and even some examples of “doing” with consciousness. Another example might be to add your name to one of the many petitions found on the Internet, one that strikes a chord in your being. Something that reflects your values and that you feel passionate about.
The writers here at PW have noted the importance of feet what with so much happening in Pisces, and the importance of standing for something. There is much to be healed in our world and many subjects to be passionate about. It seems to me that today’s astrology is making it easy for us to be individuals and at the same time part of the whole. And we can do it in baby steps! Take one, or even 2 or 3 steps to express your thoughts and feelings. Just do it.
be
len — i always appreciate how we can take such different approaches to the same topic — without knowing that we’re doing so — and end up with such complimentary articles. thank you for providing the macro to my micro today!