By Len Wallick
Mercury enters Libra on Sunday shortly after 5:00 pm EDT. There it will join the Sun, Venus and Saturn. That will be four major, classical, visible objects in one sign. Astrologers refer to such a collection as a stellium. If you think that term sounds familiar, you are correct. Think back about five months to the stellium in Aries. Admittedly, that was then and this is now. This is not a repeat performance. There are enough similarities, however, to make the next few weeks an opportunity to see how far we have come in our ability to find a common thread in a complex concurrence of events and act on it. In your life, it will be as simple and as vital as reading, and heeding, road signs.
Every planet is an archetype for a part of your life. Every sign is a garment worn by planets passing through it. Finding a common thread in a stellium, then, would logically begin with an analysis of the costume the constituents have in common. Libra, like Aries, is a cardinal sign.
There are four cardinal signs. In addition to Libra and Aries there are also Cancer and Capricorn. When the Sun enters a cardinal sign a new season starts. The specific season beginning depends on where you are, but the fact of change itself takes place for all of us at the same time. It is therefore a new beginning and a concurrent experience for all, and is fundamental to the cardinal quality of Libra. What sets Libra apart from the other three cardinal signs is the associated element.
The four Hellenistic elements, fire, earth, air and water, are attributed among the 12 zodiac signs so that each sign is a unique combination of quality (cardinal, fixed, or mutable) and element. That is how Libra comes to be the only cardinal sign that is also an air sign. Last month, Gary Caton correlated the ancient elements with Carl Jung’s four functions and made air the equivalent of thinking. That works and furthermore gives us a final piece to work with in describing the Libra wardrobe.