You can listen to the audio preview of my 2014 Spring Reading at this link.
So, I figured out over the weekend that the Sun opposite Mars, exact today, is the Radical Honesty aspect. Astrology books give a diversity of ideas about it, including the need to manage anger and resentment, a tendency to confrontation, or one’s life activities coming to a peak of action.
Yet from the charts I looked at, two deeper themes were coming through — one was the ability to move with and relate to darkness rather than to fight it; and the other was the ability to tell, or portray, the truth as people saw it, direct and to the point. The two are related — denial of one’s own inner darkness, or darkness in the world, is about the least favorable condition under which to express one’s reality.
It makes sense that this would show up (at least in one manifestation) as the Sun opposite Mars. In a way, the Sun opposite Mars is the perfect aspect. Both are high-energy, expressive, yang (‘male’ polarity) energies. The Sun can take any transit, especially from a hot, fiery planet associated with Aries, one of the Sun’s favorite signs.
Whenever the Sun opposes Mars, Mars is retrograde, in effect reversing its polarity. Amanda joked last week that Mars retrograde in Libra (a Venus-ruled sign) would make it the first truly transgendered planet, a quality I had been looking for the words to describe for months till it came out of her as a quip.
Yet Mars retrograde in Libra also has the feeling of being lost in another person, or trying to find oneself in another person. It can describe various shades of lack of independence, with relationship as its excuse. It can describe the sensation of not existing unless one is in a relationship. It can describe “can’t live with him, can’t live without him,” a paradox that afflicts many partnerships.