Dear Friend and Reader:
As I write, the Taurus Moon is square the Mercury-Mars conjunction. Many astrologers would say this is an inherently unfriendly aspect; that it connotes conflict. It’s always helpful to take astrology in context, and to size up your predictions after the fact. I would say this is an opportunity to work through conflict internally, despite the opportunities we may have to dramatize it on an outward level.
The aspect the way it’s set up looks like tension between individual values (Moon in Taurus) and collective ones (Mercury and Mars in Aquarius). This could shake out a lot of ways, but if we’re conscious that what happens today could manifest internally or externally, we have an opportunity to make a choice in the matter.
As Mercury departs Mars and moves toward Neptune, Mars is moving toward Chiron. The Mars-Chiron conjunction happens about once every two years. It happens Thursday, March 5 at 7:23 pm ET.
Contacts between Chiron and personal planets are often profound, and speak to the deepest levels of our journey on the planet. In a recent comment to a post below, someone suggested that men are expected to be like women. I would concur with that, and add that women are increasingly expected to be like men. Both of these are different than being an individual. Adopting the traits of the opposite gender is different than living out your own psychic composition in a balanced way, though it can seem like a thin line. Social pressure or the drive to conform (Aquarian themes) are different than inner exploration.
Part of what men, boys and all male creatures are responding to are an overload of chemicals loose in the environment that act like estrogen or that otherwise disrupt the endocrine system. The situation is more complex than an overload of female sex hormones, but on one level that is the nature of the problem. Sperm counts are declining in many areas and have been as the industrial age has proceeded (this link will take you to a page about the issue on the Our Stolen Future website).
Contact between Mars and Chiron will in particular raise awareness about Mars and its role. If we look at Mars as an expression of maleness, we have a comment here about the role of men evolving over a long period of time from hunter to technician. It is true that femaleness is being denatured by many of the same characteristics that are affecting men (industrialism, technology, marketing culture) but women still do end up raising the young. They may not have as much time, they may leave more of it to others, men may be getting involved more, but it is still considered by society and biology to be a largely female function.
The concept of fathering is rare among mammals and relatively new to our evolutionary line, and the domestication of men to me represents a kind of feminization; that is, if we consider warfare and hunting to be more characteristically male activities, which they are historically. To me, Mars-Chiron raises the questions about what it means to be male, what it means to be male in a technological society, and the many ways in which we design and define who we are based on social pressure to do so. Part of that social pressure must include the physical environment: literally, chemicals.
Here is a recent piece I wrote for The Ecologist in the UK. It will download as a PDF.
Catch you tomorrow,
As a side note – while women’s bodies lose their hormones rapidly around menopause – men’s hormones, particularly testosterone, decline more slowly. . .to the point at about age 52 when a man’s testosterone really falls off. Add to this the hormones in our food, etc. . . and you get middle aged men with low testosterone and increasing levels of estrogen.