Dear Friend and Reader:
The young Aries Moon is making sextiles for the next two days to all the planets in Aquarius. We have here a beautiful image of an individual existing in harmony with social forces and not sacrificing his or her own sense of self, but rather integrating it into something larger. This would be us. We are usually broadsided by group energy, or slip into lockstep marching in one direction or another. I don’t think we need to live this way: it’s not as scary as you think to assert yourself against some kind of collective consciousness (be it three friends or at a company meeting), mainly because of the wispy nature of the ego. It seems so strong and powerful; but when we drop down a level or two into core self, we find something a lot stronger and more meaningful.
Today the Moon makes a conjunction to Venus, slow and powerful in the last days before its six-week retrograde (March 6 through April 17). This is going to be interesting, on two levels. I’ve spent more time pondering the personal aspects of this transit, which fits some of my core thories about personality, sexuality and our culture of narcissism. My sense about this transit is that we have here an opportunity to resolve the many misgivings we feel about ourselves. Often these come in the form of an exaggerated sense of self-worth or self-confidence; which conceals a deeper level of mistrust or other shadow material (which can be dark, ranging from self-hatred to embarrassment). Or, the process can be reversed and we feel a sense of loss and lack that we know covers over the confidence we should feel.
Venus retrograde will shift our awareness of this process, individually and in some respects culturally. The cultural side is an emphasis on using our resources (Venus) for what is important to us. Generally this takes a lifetime to discover, but there are focal points along the way — and we are moving into one of them now. This is sensitive territory. How we really feel about ourselves is not something we can generally speak about easily. When the aspect of ourselves in question is where erotic awareness and self-esteem meet (as is likely with Venus in Aries), the truth is sometimes never spoken, and rarely known.
Today Mercury is conjunct Nessus in Aquarius. Nessus represents, or arrives nearby, some of the darkest attributes of our sexual reality: deception, revenge, rape, the fear of diseases (and their reality); everything we connect with genital anxiety. Nessus is associated with potentially inappropriate sexual contacts, of which we have defined many many many in our society; we hardly have a definition of what sexual contact is appropriate, except for compulsory heterosexual marriage.