Capricorn Astrology Studio 2025
Hello and welcome to Capricorn Studio for 2025. I'm Eric Francis your friendly neighborhood astrologer, here with a reading that is designed to serve two purposes. One the Capricorn reading for this year, as apart from the Awakening reading, this is a distinct project, and also as a study in family constellation and astrology for those who are doing this kind of work at this time in your life or who are interested in learning how toconsider some of these ideas.
The basis of this reading is what I've been calling the Family Hunger Game grouping of planets that is currently lingering around, I say lingering, they move quite slowly between about 6 and 12 degrees of Capricorn. And this is talking to points in Aries and Libra. And then there are also nearby objects in Cancer, which is pretty much lighting up the entire Cardinal Cross and bringing a number of different themes.
Into this this kind of branch of our work as students of astrology and using astrology as a self actualization tool, which in the personal sphere, that is what I think that it is really all about, all the fortune telling stuff and the personality analysis stuff.
Okay. I mean, it's entertaining and everyone should know a little bit about it. And there are some wonderful sources for that. I have a video somewhere on my favorite astrology books, all of which are old, but now here we are in the realm of these recently discovered minor planets. And by recently, I mean pretty much everything I'm working with is a 21st century discovery, although some maybe go into the 90s. I don't have all that data in front of me, but we're talking about within fairly recent times. living memory. And there's been this acceleration curve of discovering objects out by Pluto, and then one resonance layer out beyond Pluto, like in the 300 year layer, and additional centaurs and so forth.
And so there's a lot of considerations available to us. And my intent here is to boil some of that down, to distill it down and we're working in one thematic area. Now for those for whom this is the Capricorn reading last year I also had a similar situation where I wanted to create a completely different reading.
From the annual, and that's included on this page. Everyone has access to it, and I think that it's relevant to everyone as well. I mean, Capricorn is such a foundational sign for all of consciousness and, and society and ego structure and things like bones and, you know, things like this. And we've all had such a good experience of Capricorn with Pluto having gone through from 08 to 2024. We've all kind of earned our Capricorn merit badge.
So last year's reading looked at important dates in the Pluto in Capricorn let's say journey. And those dates are going to show up for everyone. There's going to be something significant at those, at those times.
So. The Family Hunger Game Cluster. Now maybe you've read my coverage of this. I pretty much talk about it every time I open up this here little microphone. On every Starcast and I give updates. And here's what it is. Just to demystify it for those who are not, you know, following this along.
In the process of Pluto working its way to the end of Capricorn, in that time frame. A number of planets, by which I mean slow moving, minor planets, not asteroids. There are important distinctions. But these are slow movers that are, that are going to be holding a pattern for a long time, the foreseeable future, like 10 to 15 more years.
So we've got time to work with this, but there's no time like the present. So planets have gathered together. In what was kind of last year seemed like early Capricorn. Now it's, now it's basically between 6 and 12. So that's good. That's kind of early in the sign and like Capricorn, which has Salient family themes really is one of the most important signs to study, by which I mean its transits and the behavior of Saturn and the contents of a Capricorn in your chart and its location in terms of what house it's situated nearby.
Four planets have gathered together in this fairly narrow degree range. And they include, the most familiar of them is Pholus, discovered in 1992. I may not know the dates of discovery of the other one, so please forgive me. Pholus is important because it was the second centaur planet ever discovered.
Chiron was the first in 1977. And it was thought to be like the only thing of its kind, which makes sense, it's Chiron, it's like, but then it turns out there's actually a lot of centaurs and the second one discovered of a very different nature and different orbit. Now a centaur planet is an orbit crosser.
So these tend to be objects that kind of shuttle between the inner and the outer solar system, or the inner and the middle or in the case of Pholus, the kind of mid solar system by Saturn, then going all the way out to near the distance of Pluto.
And what, what they do is they bring together different themes that are not usually contained in the same place. And Pholus is a very important thing to keep an eye on because it represents things that, first of all, have no other description in astrology. And the first thing about Pholus that you'll read most places, that it is, it is about a kind of a pressurized release.
It is the release of something that cannot go back into its container. Shaving cream is a good example. The experiment I still haven't tried, which I could, I'm sure I could just go right to the convenience store and get Mentos and a bottle of Pepsi or something. I'd probably use ginger ale.
You drop the Mentos into the Pepsi and the thing like creates this jet of soda that goes up like eight feet. That's a good example of Pholus, but it's also any situation that really cannot be contained or reversed. Pholus is prominent in the fires in Los Angeles. The other thing about Pholus is that it goes back to the great grandparents generation.
So if I'm doing a reading and Phola shows up prominently then the way you depart the astrology and go to reality is you start talking about the great grandparents and what was going on with them and then bring that ever closer. And so this is the proximate, generally nameable family of origin.
I don't think I can name all eight of my great grandparents. If I really thought about it, I probably could. And to some extent, it's possible those names are actually going to be lost to memory since I am rapidly becoming the oldest person in my family.
So the great grandparents generation, and what is interesting is how hazy it get, I don't think I've tried, I think I can name five. That it starts to get real hazy around the great grandparents generation is very suggestive of how little we know about our heritage.
Now, I was writing a reading for Aquarius. Maybe around like 2009, 2010. And since Capricorn is the 12th solar house of Aquarius, I asked a friend who's a young, young friend who's kind of a math genius. He's probably a genius six other ways, including banjo player. I asked him to tell me how how far back you had to go to fill, how many generations back you had to go to fill Madison Square Garden with all of your ancestors.
Turns out that by the time you go back about 10 generations you have about 20,000 ancestors. So we could do the math over. I'm not sure I got the capacity of Madison Square Garden right. I think we got to 11.5 or 11 generations.
You get the idea. You don't really have to go back too far. And then it turns out that you have enough, basically, Noni, bisnoni, bisbisnoni, grandparents, great grandparents, great great grandparents, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's crazy. It gets hazy at the great grandparents generation.
We start to lose track. We all know who our grandparents are, but then it's exponential. We have four grandparents, and then we have twice as many great grandparents. All right. So that's Pholus. Additionally, Pholus covers the theme of alcohol. Alcohol and alcohol issues, as passed down through the generation, we all know, it's top of the pops in substance abuse therapy that, you know, you can inherit your alcoholism from your great grandparents or grandparents or whatever.
So that's in the mix. And speaking of large numbers since Pholus addresses the, the matter of alcohol and alcohol in families. And, you know, I mean, I'm amazed that this whole topic of alcohol is taken so casually, but it is. It's available on every street, basically, and you know, there's like bars everywhere you go now.
Now it's cannabis dispensaries. I think we're up to five or six in little Ulster County. It's big geographically, but we've got a lot of forest and farmland and so we're starting to fill up with cannabis dispensaries, but I'm not sure that cannabis is related to Pholus. I haven't seen that, but alcohol, for sure.
And, so when I was writing the Family Hunger Game article back in June, I have this little favorite motel room up by Hunter Mountain that in the off season I can pick up for a song for the night. I just sing them a little song and and they let me stay there And I kind of got radically inspired and wrote this article kind of in a few hours in this room I forgot the name of the motel and I wanted to express how much alcohol is consumed and I couldn't really figure it out. I was thinking how much per day?
Well the number I got to was about I think 111 billion gallons, per year on the planet, of wine, beer, and distilled spirits. Beverage alcohol, as it's called in the beverage alcohol business. That is the world. Number rang a bell because the reservoir that I like to photograph and that you've seen so many of my photographs of the Ashokan Reservoir, a century old thing that was the first major upstate reservoir for New York City, 123 billion gallons.
It's 12 miles, it's 12 miles and about a mile wide at the widest it's a flooded valley. I think at the deepest, it's about 200 feet deep. Wow, that much in one year. I think we need to reckon with this. And I'm not advocating teetotaling or anything, anything like that. I mean, this really comes down to a decision of you know, studying what alcohol means to you, that I certainly suggest, and understanding what it does to the body and the brain as people.
You know, as just points of orientation around the subject, but also looking at the family constellation. And I'm not talking about alcoholism. I'm talking about just alcohol. The use of it. Was it available at the family table? Did you steal it from your parents? Do your kids steal it from you? I once saw my niece.
I used to like these little six ounce kind of treats, like a Manhattan in a little can. And I saw out of the corner of my eye, she swiped them out of my freezer and ran out the door. Yeah, this kind of thing. Okay, so we've got Pholus.
Then we have Quaoar. This takes the story all the way back to the origins of the tribe. That's thing two. So we've got two important family points. Quaoar is a planet with about a 300 year orbit. It's out past Pluto. Next is one of those weird planets without a body, and that is called Cupido. 
Qubito is the quickest of the trans Neptunian points, points without a body. 262 years, longer than Pluto, but it's the quickest of them. Getting together, all groups. Family, Society, Partnerships, Organizations, Corporations, Collections. Cupido is a super Venus. The glyph is a combination of Venus and Jupiter.
So where Venus means beauty, Cupido means art. Where Venus means love, Cupido means marriage. This is the planet of togetherness. Cupido is the fastest of the trans Neptunian planets. With "planets" in quotes, advances 1 degree and 23 arc minutes a year. It's orbit takes 262 years. Thank you very much Arlene Kramer, the late, great my old friend and the Uranian astrologer.
So it is another point of family. We've got three points of family here gathered together in Capricorn. The all important sign of family. So the question of Cupido is, what is the gathering point? What is the theme? What type of groups are we talking about? The family is always the first group. So all of our group dynamics are set up by our family of origin.
They may make positive impressions. They may make negative impressions. They may make negative impressions that reverse themselves into positive expressions. They may be completely positive. The person turns out to be a complete elitist and doesn't know how to share, whatever the case may be. But nonetheless, what is the theme of, of of the gathering?
Just tell Take this on a case by case basis, but also, the question is, what was the gathering theme of your family of origin? Final point, slow moving more of the speed of Pluto, and that point is Ixion. And Ixion is one of the characters that we have to go on a hunt for, or on a hunt for the influence, but we need to know who embodies this influence.
Ixion is the squanderer of second chances. Ixion is the amoral influence, completely dispenses with right and wrong. There is no such thing as right and wrong in Ixion's world. Ixion's big famous scene in mythology is to plot the rape of Hera, the wife of Zeus, the queen of heaven. A concept that should send chills down the spine, even of fundamentalist Christians and orthodox Jews.
Okay, that's our grouping in early Capricorn. It's gonna be there for a long time. When this music break ends, it will still be there. This is The Sun by Jelko.
The concept of all these pieces that I use in Astrology Studio and often for Starcast were ambient music, which means very little happens. The idea is that it kind of disappears below the line of liminality. So, I played it very soft and kind of wonder what's going on there.
And that's a good question. So that one was called The Sun by Jelko McMullin. Okay, so, with these planets, objects, grouped together in Capricorn and moving very, very slowly.
A couple of things happen. They line up with other planets on the cardinal cross. In particular, and I think this is really the let's just say the cat's meow, with Salacia in Aries. It too has about a 270 year orbit. So this whole group is going to be moving with Salacia in Aries. And my delineation of Salacia, and I'm sure no other minor planet astrologer would agree with me, which would make sense, is that it is about the sexual experience that is appropriate for you.
And the crisis that we're in is that we don't know the sexual experience that is appropriate for us because our family and their various theocrats behind them, you know, the pastor and the priest, the cops and everybody else have been busy telling us what's supposed to be appropriate.
And usually this comes in the size of one size fits all. And The relationship that failed for your parents is supposed to be the one that works for you, etc, etc, etc. When in reality there is there is no one size fits anything, there is no Kinsey scale , there is no LGBTQ scale, all of those are not only concepts, they are laughably ridiculous concepts.
And I speak as a, you know, long experienced aeronaut who's kind of basically tried everything. So you know, as Mr.Pisces, inhabitant of all 12 houses and all 12 signs, I can tell you that we all have our own distinct sexual orientation.
We don't usually get to find it. We are so overwhelmed by the concept of sin and the concept of guilt. And the guilt is very much a factor of Capricorn. One of the shadow programs of Capricorn. You know, one of the ways, all the signs are used as cudgels, at some point by someone. And the cudgel that Capricorn is used for is kind of the enforcement of guilt.
And the entirety of religion, with one possible exception, is an assault on and capitalization on the attack and the degrading of sexuality in any form. The Catholics are, by far, the craziest. Where, even in the sex you're allowed to have to make a baby, you're not allowed to enjoy it.
Yes, that is the "official position". Pardon the pun. The exception is that some of the Eastern religions have an inner room, which we call in the West Tantra, and that Hinduism, which seems to be, even though there's a caste system, I'm not endorsing the caste system. Seems to be the sanest and of, of the metaphysical concepts of the relationship between humans and God from what I know about it.
I'm not an expert in Hinduism, but I find a lot of its ideas resonate with me. And I kind of have a love affair with Lord Krishna and and Radharani. Well, speaking of Krishna and Radharani, their perpetual embrace, their bliss, is the thing that supports the existence of the universe in my understanding.
And who knows, maybe some Hindu expert will tell me that I'm full of it, but Krishna, he liked to fuck the cowgirls, the gopis, the cow herding girls. And, and Radharani was one of them. She just happened to be the goddess. And so we, at least in Krishna have a figure who is described as enjoying immaculate pleasures.
Human experience. Like, Christianity, Jesus didn't have sex. Mary didn't have sex. Joseph didn't have sex. Somehow they're a family. Mary, a young girl, is raped by an extraterrestrial. Oh, that's just charming. And then the, the religion starts in the first century and they're recruiting the women out of marriage to be celibate nuns and on and on and on.
And there's a book about this that I highly recommend you read if any of this resonates with you. And the book is called Eros Denied by Wayland Young. You can pick it up for 5 bucks used. It came out the year that I was born. I've probably given out 20 copies of this thing and it is just Fantastic.
And it is about the ways in which Christendom, in particular, has censored every image, word, concept, experience, and expression of sexuality. And by the way, in so doing, has built one of the largest corporations in the world. And we are all affected by this. And its means of control is guilt. It's been said that you could control a population with an entire regiment of the army, or one priest. Much cheaper to have a priest in town to cheaper to feed one priest, who doesn't even have a wife than it is to feed like, you know 200 soldiers.
Okay, so what I am reading into this is that Salacia in Aries, by the way, the sign of self, the sign of I am, is central to the process of self actualization. Look, people don't really talk about their sexual experiences. And most people don't have very many sexual experiences. And most people are embarrassed by the sexual experience that they have had.
And most have not thought about very much in terms of the ideas behind their sexual experiences. And that's because there really are not any for most people. There are no ideas. People have not read a book, nearly anyone. Have you read a book about sex? What book was it? Please tell me - efc@planetwaves.net
I'm taking an extended survey. But everyone's an expert. Everyone's an expert, but they've never read a book. And they don't have words for the things that they feel, and so on and so on. So Salacia, throughout the whole duration of this Capricorn group, is going to be square.
All these points in Capricorn. And this, to me, describes the ways in which the family of origin pattern contains Shapes, damages, guilts, controls, contains, commands, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, the most natural thing about us, which is the way we would orient sexually. If people were allowed to orient the way they wanted, there'd be all kinds of orientations.
There would be the people who really did want to be with one partner. They would be the people who wanted to experiment around and could do so without any guilt. They would be the people who didn't have many sexual feelings at all, but that's there's not very many of those, like nearly none.
There would be the people who would be totally content having sex with themselves. There would be people who would be content having sex with themselves in the company of others. There would be people who like to have sex in groups of various configurations. There would be on and on and on. There would be, speaking of gender, same sex, opposite sex, mixed, mixed situations.
Wow, there's a lot of, a lot of options. But, under Christendom, they're all forbidden. And you can't enjoy any of them. 
That's all I could say. Well, maybe it's okay if same sex people hold hands or something like that. Meanwhile the fucking boys and impregnating nuns and burying babies in mass graves and so forth and so on. And this is the scam. We have to not fall for the scam. But the thing is that not falling for the scam is very challenging because you need the scam explained to you and the guilt has been put into our flesh and our blood.
With barbs and hooks like those vaccines on adhesive tape that leave barbs in the skin and then impregnate the body with poison. That's kind of like how, like a million little barbs on the tape. That's what's been done to us. And so it takes a lot to claim ourselves back. But, this pattern is very, very active right now.
And the chart that I'm looking at here is the March 29th total solar eclipse in Aries, which lands right on Salacia and squares the whole Capricorn cluster and is opposite what's going on in Libra. And what's going on in Libra is the game Maki Maki which is kind of really, really weird fertility cult.
From if you want to know more about it, I cover it in the Libra reading in The Awakening. And it's kind of a second generation god after the original on Rapa Nui, Easter Island. And they're the ones who toppled all the statues. And the fertility cult involved an annual game where somebody would have to swim to another island and risk his life and then go out to a cliffside and find a specific egg, a single egg of a specific bird and then swim back, and the first one to swim back after having risked everything, his life, several times dies would win the prize of doing nothing.
So there's a lot of, I think, of futility in Maki Maki, but I look at it as like the pointless game. And we've largely reduced our sexual encounters to a pointless game. And it's quite depressing if you think about it for too long, given the incredible potential and beauty of what we have to share with one another.
Okay, Logos is also in this mix, in Capricorn and Libra. It is the idea and the expression of the idea in one thing. Ah, now this is getting interesting. There, there is an idea here. You are an idea, and you have a means of expression through your life and through your existence.
In Cancer, there's nothing that lines up exactly, but there are planets that are going to work their way in. One is Asbolus, and one is Chaos, and they're dangling around the Aries point in Cancer in their first few degrees of Cancer. They're out there, but I'm not reading them too deeply into this right now, and in fact, Oh, we're good with the T square of Capricorn, Aries, and Libra.
Now what happens with this is that this is a slow moving setup of these planets moving along incredibly incredibely slowly, we had nothing like this till the 20th century, when Pluto was discovered and Pluto was ignored for the first 40 years, except by Dane Rudhyar, one of the one, you know, weirdo composer, founder of humanistic astrology and psychological astrology.
But besides that, the astrology community completely ignores Pluto. It's completely ridiculous. And they don't know what to make of these new planets at this point. All right, so. These slow movers, a new concept in astrology, are kind of waiting, and planets move through, they come through the territory.
The quick movers come through the territory and they light the thing up. And that's what's happening now. For example, Venus retrograde is about to happen. Venus, as of this reading is in Pisces.
I'm working out to February and March on the horoscopes. And pretty soon, Venus gets into Aries and it starts to go through the degrees where it will be retrograde. So it's going to be spending a lot of time, when it gets into Aries, it's going to spend a lot of time mixed up in this which Venus is our desire, nature, it is our attractiveness, it is sensuality, it is experiences of of love, it is beauty.
Venus is about being turned on by women. There is a war on this going on. Personally, I refuse to not be turned on by women. It is my god given birthright to think that women are beautiful, to respect and love them, to ask them if they want to be photographed, to ask them whatever else they might be interested in.
But this is becoming a crime scene. This is classic Catholic Capricorn feminist bullshit. To say, you know, you can't feel those things. You can't think those things. You cannot depict those things. Venus is going to move from Pisces, where it's very much at home. Venus is a sea creature. She comes out of the sea when she's born.
Then she goes into Aries and is going to be going real slow through the whole cluster. But what I mean is through the whole thing is, in Aries, Venus will make a conjunction to Salacia. She'll be still in Pisces in March, so. Well, retrograde but we'll have moved through a conjunction to Salacia, which means squares to all the Capricorn, oppositions to all of the Libra sooner or later, and squares to the Cancer material.
So Venus is going to be kind of in the crosshairs of all of this, which when Venus gets involved in something, particularly Venus and Mars, but all the inner planets. But Venus and Mars are very sensory. And they are part of the sexual binary that our society is on a digital denial trip exists.
I mean, look, right now, you're listening to me, I kind of don't have hormones, right? I'm vibrating in here. I'm vibrating in your equipment on your side of the internet and all this stuff but I am a man and I'm sitting here and I've got all my stuff. But the thing is that when we get into the digital realm there's this massive neutering and that's the obsession with they them.
That's the they them game. It is all about, this is Maki Maki, it is the pointless game. The "non binary, I'm not", what the heck does that mean?
You don't have a dominant hand? What? When Venus gets into this mix, it suddenly is going to become very real and sensory. That's what happens when you mix an inner planet with the outer planets. It just all manifests tangibly in some way. I wrote all the Capricorn horoscopes out to the April Monthly this morning to make sure that I had a sense of the whole spring season and what was going on.
Well, this becomes very real all of a sudden, and my central thesis here, the concept that I am working with is that The most important thing that the Family Hunger Games pattern is conditioning is your experience of your sexuality, which is the same thing as your curiosity, it is the same thing as your creative impulse, it is the same thing as what created you and what you want to create.
And if we're living in times of economic stress and misery and the rising tide of fascism, just look up Wilhelm Reich in Goodreads and read like 20 Wilhelm Reich quotes. He had this all figured out in the 1930s when he was trying to explain why the fascists were so popular. It was partly radio, but we've got that.
We've got our version of radio. We've got our disembodying tribalizing influence, the internet. And the sexual desperation led to blatant fascism. This is not that hard to figure out, but if you want to be a creative, curious, alive, loving, friendly, abundant, sharing, pleasure sharing, pleasure seeking person, then you're going to have the perfect experiment to work with.
And the beauty of this is, and I have seen this happen in myself over a long period of time and in other people, and I've discussed this with my teachers, is that your self actualization will run in parallel to your sexual evolution, to your sexual growth. And the craziest thing that I have seen in my decades of working with people on their relationships, and I figured this out fairly early on and I don't have really very much reason to think that it's gotten better, much less changed, is that relationships are often compacts not to grow.
And the compact usually comes in the form of some tacit or silent agreement not to threaten the other by growing.
Now, what we tend to pick up from this gestalt of the family that I am saying is, at least for the sake of discussion, located in this cluster in Capricorn, and then elaborated on by all of the planets around it. I think this whole thing is about Calacia more than anything.
Which is going to be taking a series of conjunctions from Venus and a total solar eclipse. This is very wild and beautiful and contains a lot of potential. But the Capricorn group describes the ways in which we were conditioned to be who we are and the ways in which we were conditioned to relate to one another.
And a lot of this deal is sealed very early in life, first two or three years, where when we emerge amidst this group. With all the influences going back all those years, Quaoar filling Madison Square Garden and Pholus, the great grandparents you can't name, and the grandparents you can name, and some aunts and uncles in there, some parents and some cousins.
And Cupido, the invitation to come to the dinner table, come to the group, the consummation, the expression of the relationship, and then Ixion, the stinker, the person who does their best to kind of ruin it for everyone because they themselves are in some way ruined
That whole mix of influences has you being a kind of a piano where the notes that you're capable of playing or singing that in some way either threaten others or that do not resonate with them get screwed down. And so imagine that everyone is a piano with 88 keys but that half or three quarters of their keys are screwed down.
You're going to be limited in the kinds of melodies that you can play. And it is possible to get out of this. However, the possibility finds expression one way only, and that is in trust. Learning trust. Therapy is not about learning jargon. It is not about being fixed. It's not about having insights. It's not about diagnosis and medication.
Expression therapy is about a relationship where you learn trust and importantly, where the person with whom you're learning trust has nothing that they can hang over your head. This is crucial because as soon as the person has something that they're hanging over your head, a power dynamic enters.
The scenario and the power dynamic in itself makes trust very, very difficult. It's why your friends and partners cannot be your therapist. You need someone more distant. You need someone more remote from the situation, but close to you.
Where there is not trust it is very difficult to have an honest relationship, and what usually happens is, all of these Ixion factors enter and take over. They include, the biggest four, are resentment. This is a very serious problem in women, who seem to have a piece of their brain or their psyche that is convinced that resentment is some kind of a god given right that will, you know, lead them to enlightenment.
No. Resentment will do nothing other than than screw up your relationships.
Jealousy. This is a big one for men and women. In different forms. Women tend to be jealous of well, yeah. Let's just say this is a big one for men and for women. And it's another one that's just taken as an environmental given, and it's a god given right, that if you're a woman and you're, Boyfriend or husband has a female friend or creative partner you think it's your right to destroy the relationship. And similar with men, if a woman has a male friend, the, the, the primary partner can think that they have a right to destroy that relationship, it really is an entitlement and it's, it's horrifying, I think, because it reveals and conceals and prevents the healing of profound insecurity.
And wherever there is jealousy, the hand inside the puppet is death. Jealousy is merely a puppet. And the driving force of it is, for example, the notion that one is so, well the experience of one being so invested in a relationship, that their entire personality is built in and around the relationship, that anything that threatens the relationship feels like their own life is threatened.
That's jealousy. The article is is Jealousy and the Abyss. I'm gonna link that. I'm gonna link the Family Hunger game
If I ever miss a resource, just get my attention or Eli's attention and we'll get it. Okay, so, next, competitiveness. This is more of a petty thing around women. Men tend to be able to play competitive games and then go out for a beer. Women will play competitive games to the death.
And will compete with people that they say they love. They will compete for men. They will compete for any form of a material reward. They'll compete for who has the most expensive boots. They'll compete for any damn thing that there is. And it's all pure maki maki. It's pure bullshit. But, this seems to be very deeply impregnated.
This is all generally under the heading of Ixion. Now coming from Capricorn itself, we have the guilt and shame control. And we know from John Bradshaw and pretty much all of the substance abuse theories that the guilt, shame, and addiction pattern are closely related. Now guilt and shame are not the same thing.
Guilt is more of a generalized feeling that one's existence is wrong. Shame is often similarly used to put a person down through I would say the deliberate exposure and embarrassment of the person. So all this Me Too movement stuff, this is all about shaming people. And when you see anyone doing that to anyone, anyone doing it to anyone, no matter how right one of the anyone's is, no matter how wrong one of the anyone's is, that is the time to turn around and walk away because this is another game.
And the game is directed not at the supposedly wrong person being dragged through the tabloids, or the town paper, or human resources, but at you. Now, the mildest form on the guilt shame spectrum is embarrassment. My basic teaching on embarrassment is this.
I'll just say it and move on and maybe come back to it. Embarrassment is easiest to work with. It's the most pleasurable of the three, though shame can also be a pleasurable experience, particularly if you're aware of, aware of what's going on. But embarrassment, it's kind of like the Boy Scout version of it.
And what I suggest you do is experiment with embarrassment. As a guide to what you should go toward rather than avoid. So the concept of embarrassment is, is what you are supposed to run from or eschew in some way. And what I'm suggesting is that embarrassment is actually an invitation into the deeper pleasure of experience.
All of these, all of the above guilt. Shame and embarrassment are all used as control devices and they are all born of false morality. They do not actually indicate right or wrong in any sense. They're all control devices.
Entitlement. This is a big one. And finally, lying. Casual lying. Lying by birthright, lying because you don't think another person can handle the truth, always a lame excuse. And essentially, our relationships that are supposed to be based on truth, trust, and love to be healthy, more often end up being based on guilt, mistrust, and deception.
All Ixion material. All very shadowy and in the end, basically a very expensive path to misery. You know, the only way out is through, there there is no avoiding these things and also healing them. But one of the ways that we avoid them, typically, is alcohol. If you want to know what alcohol is doing It is. It is present most of the time, particularly when it becomes a factor in a family or a relationship.
It is there to conceal resentment, just jealousy, competitiveness, guilt, shame, embarrassment, entitlement, and lying, casual lying, systemic lying, overt lying, and withholding. Now, this is all a very tall order, though I think that there are direct ways. to healing. And one of the direct ways to healing is by being real about wanting healing, wanting to not be controlled by these things.
Another important factor in healing is having the commitment be part of a relationship and then the dharma of the relationship becomes the healing journey. And that, that becomes the most important thing that you share. But this is often terrifying. And it's terrifying because the result of this would be true intimacy.
That's what happens when people make a commitment to heal together. And they start to let go of their withholds and their secrets and their resentments. And they take responsibility for their jealousy and their competitiveness and all of their feelings and they stop guilting each other, the inevitable result is being closer.
And one way to think of all these things is games. Now, there's a terrible book that everyone should read called Games People Play by Dr. Eric Berne. And Berne says in the introduction that most people go straight to the games part of the book and they don't read the introduction, and the introduction is very important.
It's not even that long. The whole book is not that long, and it was a bestseller in 1964. You could have a book like this that was a bestseller. And the reason I say that it's a terrible book is because it, exposes all of these games that people voiced on one another almost all the time. Once you've read this and you know some of the games, you know, you start to memorize the games.
You learn games like lets you and him fight. It's a three handed game where one person instigated, fight, instigates the fight between two other people. Oh, we've all had that one. This is a game. Rapo is a game. This is a big one in our culture. This is the whole Me Too movement  is rapo.
The Me Too movement is about well, rapo is about usually a woman turning on the charm and the attractiveness. And then when men are attracted to her one by one, she disses them or attacks them. And it can go all the way out to rape scenarios and going to court and all of this. But it's essentially the use of a person's attraction, natural attraction.
Not malicious intent. Natural attraction. Using that against the person. Another game is "What do you expect from a man with a wooden leg?"
Hmm. You know, that, where someone says "Well you know, I could do this, but I've got a wooden leg. So I can't do it. Look how hard I've tried. "That's a great game. Where it's a game played in usually marriage counseling. Well, I took the trash out. Look how hard I've tried. I went to therapy once. Look how hard I've tried.
Should I go on? The purpose of all games is to avoid intimacy. They are all games. Designed to avoid, delay, prevent, destroy, et cetera, et cetera. True intimacy of any kind.
Without games, we would be much more intimate. And so what people typically use games for is as a way to avoid closeness. What I'm talking about is when you start to talk about your resentment, you own up to it, you take responsibility for your jealousy, you realize you don't have to compete with your friends.
You decide that you will never, ever guilt a person or shame a person or intentionally embarrass a person. The result is that you become closer to people, and closer to yourself. And deception and withholding are very important parts of this. If you decide that you're going to be a truthful person, you're going to get a result.
And the result is that You're going to scare off some people, and they're the ones who need to be scared off, but then you're going to become closer to some people that you will start to have real closeness in your life. And that the closeness will be based on a commitment to sincerity.
Other factors start to enter. I think that, love, what we really call love, besides like the besmatten, is that the word? And you know, infatuated, that's not really love. I think when we say love, we mean trust. When there's actual love, the dominant experience is trusting the person and of being trusted by the person involved.
We start to replace these toxic things like competitiveness with and resentment with forgiveness. Now, this is a difficult one because you cannot both forgive and be hurt. I think that it's better to be hurt and angry, honestly, than it is to forgive falsely. And you know you've been false about your forgiveness when you're experiencing resentment of some kind.
There's a spiritual move here, which is to bear in mind that the ego can never and will never forgive, it will only condemn. And that when you're having an issue with someone, you have to ask for spiritual help forgiving them. You ask for help from your inner teacher, the Holy Spirit, Shekinah, all these different names for the same thing which is the inner teacher.
The ego cannot forgive. Usually that's you and you need help. Generosity. This is, this is giving without needing anything in return. And, or expecting or requiring. And it's also giving something from what you need. You know, if you have a warehouse full of tuna fish, it's not generous to give somebody a can of tuna fish.
If you are having problems and you don't really have that much to eat, but you share your food with someone else, that's generosity. And generosity is also taking risks for people and giving them something you cannot get back. We all need our time. We all need our goodwill. So that's generosity.
Understanding, as Venus goes through this, we're going to get a lot of opportunities to do these things. So understanding is an interesting one. Understanding sounds like standing under. I had to go digging into this. How did that, how did that word come to be? Well, it actually means to stand among. So anytime someone says, do you understand, then translate that into, do I stand among this?
Do I join you in this? Am I really with you? And when you're seeking understanding, there's no better way to get it than to stand among, to go to the place and talk to the people, to have the conversation and to take your time learning. So standing among. And finally there's something that is, in theory, very challenging, but we see little examples of it, and that is compersion.
Compersion is a word that came out of a Ouija board in the 1970s at a community in the Haight Ashbury called Carista, the Carista community. Which was a communal place where people shared lovers and shared money. It was kind of full on communist household right of the Ashbury district of San Francisco.
And they, they noticed a, a certain kind of pleasure when someone they were in love with was having sex and joy with another person. You may think, well, this is not possible, but frankly, Pornhub is loaded with these fantasies. Cuckold porn, for example, is essentially compersion porn. And so the idea is not far from the very surface of popular culture.
And we, I think, all wish we could do this, and some people can. So normally, if you know, you go to a party and your significant other is is having a conversation with a person of the opposite sex and the conversation looks like it might be a little bit flirtatious and certainly very friendly and they kind of look cute together.
You might become enraged, jealous, resentful, and competitive. Or you might experience compersion and have sincere happiness that your partner, who's someone you love, or you say you love, is having fun. Now compersion, I think it needs a big, a big expansion. If you dig far enough, you'll find my articles about it.
They still exist on the internet somewhere, maybe sexuality. Wayback Machine and find the Eric Francis archive in the ancient now defunct sexuality.org, but one of the most telling things that ever had happened to me in an astrology reading was early in my career. I went through like major boot camp, in 1995 through 1998 when I when I went to Europe the first time.
I did hundreds of readings. And I had developed a method where I listened to people. That's why these, these readings and chart key readings are very different than my other work, because I'm doing all the talking. But in a consultation my, my objective is to listen as much as possible. So I did a lot of listening for hundreds and hundreds of readings.
And a young woman came to me and said her boyfriend would not let her go to community college. You're gonna, you're gonna guess why. Right? Well, she might meet somebody at community college. So You know, jealousy and envy are very toxic emotions and here, but here she is with someone dependent on him in some way And he will not let her, not like go away to the University of Hawaii or you know you know, collect her scholarship to Broward University or whatever, you know you know, go on a world tour.
No, go to community college. Well, there might be a friendly, she might meet a friendly guy there.
This comes straight out of family dynamics. All, all of these negative emotional patternings. Come out of family dynamics. A lot has to do with siblings. I wonder what the sibling connection and, and the sibling connection in in this is. Siblings are a third house topic. Cousins, I believe, sixth.
Siblings are third. So I will think that through and see if we can bring siblings into this, but we don't need astrology to bring siblings in. The entire gestalt of the the original family is in kind of summarized in the Hunger Game cluster. And to me, it would seem that in many ways, Ixion Drives the show. There's no right. There's no wrong.
There's only what someone wants or is willing to gain through their exercise of power over another person. Example, the boyfriend would throw her out if she went to community college or some bullshit like that. Who knows if it's gonna happen And I don't know the outcome of that case. I don't know what she did but boy was it eye opening.
And what very often happens is that in a couple relationships, these dynamics appear and only one person is interested in working with them. It is not 1940 or 1950 where you have to stay with such a person. I think that it is important to think long and hard before you have a child with such a person.
I think that if you have children with such a person, where you figured out that 10 years have gone by and they are just simply exuding all the stuff, all the treachery, the jealousy, the resentment, the competitiveness, and the shaming, and the guilting, and the entitlement, the lying, whatever combination of those things you've got to figure out what to do with the parenting situation.
So these can, these, this whole scenario can lead to very, very complicated situations. But that becomes the. the point of learning, that becomes the place where you have to become an enlightened person right then and right there, especially if children are involved.
And if there are not children involved, I think that to transition a relationship through honesty and leveling with someone, and opening up about your withholds is the only way to clear the karma, if not the patterns, but at least to let, you know, let go of the potential bonds, is to leave in an honest and and gentle way.
And I listen to the police scanner. I hear the domestics going on all day long. You listen to the scanner for an hour, and you'll hear the police call to the scene of a domestic.
Are they separated? Often domestics between parents and children. There'll be a discussion, you'll hear them say negative alcohol, negative weapons. No, one party's drunk. Thehouse has received 10 calls, or 5 calls in the past, there's a database. How many calls has the address received?
That is kept track of. And they know these things. And it happens a lot. And I get that we are in desperate, desperate times. We are in a kind of a hunger game.
Right now. Where, look the big forces are trying to make sure that we're all turned against one another. All turned against one another. And it's our decision whether we participate in that or not. And it is your choice whether you embark sincerely on a healing journey or not. All right I'm gonna call it good.
If you find this discussion inspiring I am happy to open up a, a branch of discussion discussion group, email group, zoom call, further presentations like this, and sign off at 12:26 pm on the 17th.
All right, lots of love. Thank you for joining me for this and bye for now.