Into the Wild Fiery Yonder: Sun Enters Sagittarius

Today is Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2011. The Sun enters Sagittarius in bold style today at 11:08 am EST. When it does, it makes a square to Chiron and a trine to Uranus. This is a veritable explosion of fiery/male/yang/expressive energy. After several days of working its way through the late degrees of Scorpio and a long square to Neptune, the Sun bursts free in a fire sign, picking up the energy not just of Uranus and Chiron, but also of Jupiter and Mars.

Especially noteworthy is the trine of the Sun to Uranus (big flow of energy) and the square of the Sun to Chiron (a planet associated with Sagittarius). Prior to the ingress, note that the Sun is void of course in Scorpio. This presents openings for unlikely events, possibilities and feelings. The transition of the Sun from Scorpio to Sagittarius is one of the most palpable of them all. We take the most fixed emotional sign and convert it to the most mutable fire sign. The transition is from deeply introspective to fully expressive — and we have a solar eclipse building to boot. That takes place at 1:09 am EST on Friday, coupled with Mercury stationing retrograde in Sagittarius on Thursday: fire and more fire.

In Scorpio the themes are about introspective passion, attachment and control, and they always involve others. In Sagittarius the themes are about letting go of the need for validation or involvement; the sensation is of the single-pointed arrow of direction. If there is one sign that insinuates relationship, it’s Scorpio. If there is a sign that insinuates something else, it’s Sagittarius. Even the opposite sign of Sagittarius, Gemini, is a sign about the dualistic nature of an individual and relating to oneself.

Sagittarius contains some of the most personally relevant mysteries to be found in astrology; in particular it’s the home of the Galactic Core.

In case you’re wondering where the Moon is through this transition, it spends most of the day in Libra, and happens to be conjunct Saturn when the Sun ingresses Sagittarius. That offers some solidity and balance to our emotions, a momentary container for all the fire and expressive energy. Then the Moon moves to Scorpio just before 9:00 pm EST, on the way to its rendezvous with the Sun (the New Moon and partial solar eclipse) later this week. That’s a little extra emotional depth — kind of a lunar coda to whatever song of transformation we’ve been composing in the last month — as we leap into the shift of solar energy.

Most of us are familiar with the qualities of Sagittarian people: they stop at nothing (sometimes quietly, sometimes swashbuckling); they are determined; they’re social but fiercely independent; and yes, they love to travel. That last fact is on the Top 10 List of Astrological Truisms we haven’t written yet.

For a deeper, albeit somewhat unusual perspective, we can go to Esoteric Astrology by Alice A. Bailey. The thing with reading Bailey is that in order to get anything from it you have to just consider what she’s saying without respect to how she could possibly know something so outrageous. It’s kind of like reading science fiction, which makes sense in its own universe and then teaches you things you can use in this one.

Anyway — here is how she warms up the topic of Sagittarius:

Sagittarius is sometimes depicted as an archer on a white horse and a study of the meaning of this symbolism will reveal a great deal of inner teaching. This is one of the later ways of portraying this constellation. Earlier, in Atlantean days (from which period we have inherited what we know about astrology), the sign was frequently depicted by the Centaur — the fabulous animal which was half man and half horse. The horse symbolism dominated Atlantean myths and symbols, just as the ram and the lamb are prominently to be found in our modern presentations. This earlier sign of the Centaur stood for the evolution and the development of the human soul, with its human objectives, its selfishness, its identification with form, its desire and its aspirations. The archer on the white horse, which is the more strictly Aryan symbol for this sign, signifies the orientation of the man towards a definite goal. The man is then not part of the horse but is freed from identification with it and is the controlling factor. The definite goal of the Centaur, which is the satisfaction of desire and animal incentives, becomes in the later stages the goal of initiation, which meets with satisfaction in Capricorn, after preliminary work has been done in Sagittarius. The keynote of the Centaur is ambition. The keynote of the Archer is aspiration and direction, and both are expression of human goals but one is of the personality and the other is of the soul.

There is a lot in there, not the least of which being the inflection that astrology was packed into a boat, set sail and — landed somewhere else.

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