Cool Cap Moon; hot Psyche square Eris

Good Morning World:

Capricorn is an alert but calming energy, and the newborn Moon in this sign should be cooling off some of the hot energy we’ve been experiencing the past few days. Cap is an earth sign, practical in nature and known among other things for its ability to compartmentalize emotions, thoughts and ideas. This is partly why it gets so much done; it can get what does not matter in any moment out of the way. Note that the Moon is waning toward the Pisces New Moon on Feb. 24.

The Pisces Sun (arrived there yesterday) has added some emotional depth to the wildly dominant Aquarius sky. It’s not that Aquarius lacks depth, it’s just that it tends to keep it deep in the bottom of a jar. Aquarius, to be itself, must do what we find it very hard to do these days: give, sincerely, from ourselves. We don’t see the value; we are constantly asking the price we’re going to get paid; what’s in it for us; Aquarius is here to give out the water that it has collected. We are an incredibly self-centered lot. I will be talking more about the cultural and individual narcissism that has consumed us alive when I get into Venus retrograde in Aries in the next weeks.

With the Sun now in Pisces, we are fully immersed in that water. It is a relief to some, to experience emotional contact and to others it’s terrifying. But the mental plane (represented currently by Aquarius) is jammed with energy right now, and most of us are experiencing some form of overload.

With the Sun in Pisces, the season is transitioning. The mutable signs such as Pisces are the Sun’s last cycle at the end of a season. It is the time of transition, and those of us up here in the Northern Hemisphere may be noticing winter releasing its grip and slipping into spring. Up here in New York we had a very spring-like, half-hearted but no less beautiful snowstorm that has all but melted away by 10 am.

For a little astrology background, there are three kinds of signs, cardinal, fixed and mutable. Cardinal signs start the seasons; fixed signs are their peak energy; mutable signs are where they dissolve into. In modern terms, mutable means changeable, but in ancient terms it is about the ability to mutate between cardinal (high initiative) and fixed (preserver energy). Pisces is the ultimate mutable sign; it is the cosmic ocean that contains not just all three kinds of energies, but trace elements of all the signs and planets, like the ocean it symbolizes.

Note that the “stimulous” “package” (the sexual language is purely unintentinal) was signed into law with the Sun it the last degree of a fixed sign, Aquarius. As mentioned below, this last degree is a potent symbol of transformation; it represents the relationship of the individual to the collective, but it also represents holding onto the last vestiges of something — the fixed nature of the sign Aquarius being responsible for that. There is an attempt at stability; but what we really have is a moment of transition, and that is always chaotic.

You cannot change a society overnight; even individuals take a long time to do what they term get ready to make progress. That would be all of us. That is about resolve and focus, something we don’t exactly have in the days of Twitter. The mental struggle we face is portrayed nicely today in the aspect Psyche square Eris. On the long list of aspects today, this one stands out as touching the moment: Psyche representing the feeling of an injured mind, or the presence of the soul (depending on how you manifest it) and Eris being about the perosnality chaos that we are experiencing in our era of history.

I am often asked why I take Psyche as the sense of the psychic wound that does not heal (echo of Chiron, but Chiron can be far more proactive toward progress) and my reasoning is that our race struggles to sense the presence of its soul. The soul is the personal manifestation of God for each person; it is the sense, when you look into a person’s eyes, that someone is actually home — and we tend to doubt, over and over, that someone is indeed home (within ourselves).

Eris represents, on one level, identity chaos. In the 1970s, you would figure out who you are; there was something called the Human Potential Movement, of which Planet Waves is a modern expression. In the 2000s, you decide who you think you are, and working with your inner publicist, you construct pages on Facebook or Myspace and paint a picture of who you want the world to perceive you as.

There is a difference.

Yours & truly,