This week is building toward the Leo Full Moon, which is at 11:38 pm EST on Jan. 26. On the way to that lunation — which itself will be ramping up emotional intensity, like all Full Moons — we’ll also be feeling the build of another aspect that may be waking us up to some less savory (or downright mean) tendencies in groups. That would be the conjunction of Mars with Nessus in late Aquarius.
Mars conjunct Nessus is exact the same day as the Full Moon (just after 9 am EST) but like most Mars aspects, you’ll likely feel it intensifying through the week. Peer pressure is a very real force in our lives, long past our emergence from adolescence into adulthood. If you’re having trouble locating a recent example in your own life (it can be subtle, and insidious), consider the alleged coercion by Lance Armstrong to get his other Tour de France teammates to use illegal performance-enhancing drugs.
People do things they’d rather not do and go against their own instincts and values on regular basis. Why is that?
There is tremendous psychological power in groups, combined with perceived and sometimes real power to exact consequences. We give up our power to groups often, and it’s made easier when we don’t quite know what we want. But most of the time, deep down, we really do know what we want. So what gets in the way of doing something about it?
As mentioned, Mars-Nessus looks a lot like the common dynamic of a group of individuals abdicating their individuality to go along with something mean. It has a flip side, though. Mars here could also represent the potential for an individual to wake up and decide not to go along with it — whatever ‘it’ may be. One key phrase of Nessus is ‘the buck stops here’. That ‘buck’, however, is very often an old pattern of abuse asking to be healed.
The territory that Nessus represents tends to be unpleasant, and deeply so. As in, the kind of stuff you want a really good therapist for. Nessus is generally representative of family shadow material and old pain that has been passed along or perpetrated through the generations. Dealing with this material can bring up all kinds of questions about loyalty, guilt, shame and fear of being ostracized.
One of the reasons many people do not seek help with healing needs is out of a fear of embarrassing the family for what it did. There is loyalty that can even extend into not telling a therapist. Nessus in Aquarius can be that conspiracy of silence — and the diffusion of responsibility to the point where nobody is actually responsible.