Soul Astrology

The Psychological Astrology Blog

[psycheastrology]

When interpreting transits and progressions, perhaps the most important connections to look for are the conjunctions, oppositions, and squares, the tense aspects that give fire to the sesonality and psychology of the moment. The hard aspects symbolize something occuring with urgency, pressure, fire, desire, want, and passion, that seeks resolution in the present moment and brings us back to the emergent nature of the present moment. It is difficult to ignore the emergency of square and opposition aspects especially. Harmonious aspects, on the contrary, have to do with something that may occur in the future, like hope, dream, fancy, possibility, potentials, and undeveloped latent talents and creative prowess.

[psycheastrology]

The dark world of the psyche is accessible only indirectly, visible to only what is invisible and inaccessible within us. Astrology lends access to this psychic reality in a mythopoetic form of planets, signs, and aspects, following the ancient and celestial rule of "as above, so below". Learning how to discern the symbolic forms can take time and practice, not in the sense of mastery, but in the sense of sensibility to the symbolic world, to images, meanings, and symbols.

[psycheastrology]

Every planet, aspect, and house is a psychological process, a dynamic partaking in a greater psychic reality of mythic archetypes and primordial gods. Each placement can carry us into contact with the collective unconscious memory of humanity, an archetypal readiness to imagine and see the world in universal, mythical ways. By learning to see the chart more archetypally, these archetypes become lived and experienced in the heart and soul.

[psycheastrology]

Saturn is the structuring element in the horoscope that gives vision to the shape of our psychological lives, the shaper of our perceptions, images, and experiences. Saturn is associated with the building function of the psyche that creates, builds, and sculpts our realities through elaborate fantasy work and activity. Saturday is the day ruled by Saturn, the day before the Work is finished and the World is brought into consciousness and the light of day.

[psycheastrology]

Mercury-Jupiter aspects may have a creative intelligence capable of understanding the mysteries of existence while struggling with the practical minutiae of everyday life. They may have a gift for philosophy, theoretical thinking, asking questions, tapping into collective symbols, and elevated thought bordering on the psychic. Oftentimes, there is abundant creativity and passion for learning, knowing, writing, and sharing the knowledge with others. There may be a passion for collecting classic books, antiques, and other items that reflect the collective history of the human spirit.

[psycheastrology]

Mercury-Neptune aspects submerge the mind in the cosmic realm of symbols and archetypes, merging or even confusing dream with reality, and making the person extraordinarily sensitive to implied meanings and the undertones of conversations. This mind thinks associatively, mythopoetically, and symbolically, grasping the irrational givens of life more readily than it grasps facts, prosaic realities, or technical details. Half awake, half asleep in a daze and haze, it is easier to see the bigger, cosmic picture rather than individual pieces and daily details. These belong to Virgo and the opposite pole of the Mercury-Neptune natural opposition.

[psycheastrology]

The astrological aspects represent the notes in a celestial music, subtle harmonies, resonances, and dissonances of the psyche with its own figures, sides, and faces. Every aspect needs to be "heard" for its richness, acoustics, and fine meanings. This approach moves the visual approach of the eyes to the symbolic sensitivity of the inner ear that can feel differences and dissonances as insights and symbols.

[psycheastrology]

The psyche's urge toward individuation and psychic development turns the world into a stage of mythopoetic powers and personified presences, all projections of the collective unconscious. Astrology works in the same way: whatever is in the heart finds its miraculous expression in the sky, with the blessing of the soul. Projection becomes rooted in eros, in love of the sky and the celestial horizon and its music of the spheres. For this reason, astrology brings us back to the animistic, animated, and symbolic thinking of the primordial human, turning our gaze up to a sky full of life.

[psycheastrology]

Sun-Chiron aspects carry particular importance, for they illuminate the Apollo-Chiron myth very vividly: wounded identity, painfully sharp light, prophecy, the art of healing and medicine, and the restoration of an abandoned deity (Chiron). The god image inside the individual may be wounded, seeking the light in the form of an identity wound. From a centaur deity into a psychological complexity, Chiron has been turned into a wounded self, a hurting complex of insignificance, pride, and self-regard.

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Jupiter is the principle of growth and spiritual development, of growing from a deeper connection with life's mysteries. How we make meaning and what life means to us is presided over by Jupiter. The planets aspected by Jupiter show the ways and archetypes through which we make life meaningful. For example, if someone has Jupiter in aspect to Mercury, learning may be one way they make life meaningful for them; they may be a bookworm, etc. In aspect to the Moon, it is care, feelings, and protection that make life meaningful for the individual. In aspect to Mars, it is an active life that may make life meaningful for us.

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Afflicted planets have been made to carry a negative message of the planet's meaning for the individual. They may hide a psychological richness beneath their conflicted expression, for they tend to express themselves through contradiction, paradox, and incongruous ways of being and operating. The individual may gain substantial experiences in the sphere of the planet while trying to reconcile the conflicting messages about the essence of the planet.

[psycheastrology]

The Sun is the divine child, abandoned and alone, shining in the dark, crying for love and attention from the adult part of us. The Sun shows us at our best when opposites have been reconciled and united, when there is no contradiction between adult and child, love and work, creativity and growth, being and life. This ideal reflects our potential to strive towards becoming whole, to experience life fully and meaningfully, to become what we always have been at heart. This ideal is the archetype of the Self, the all-encompassing center and periphery of our inner life.

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The Moon can tell us about the inner world of a person and how they go about defending it. It symbolizes the tender, innate part of the character that is defended and hidden from the world. The Moon is both the shell and the tender spot inside. This synchrony of defender and defended mirrors the unitary nature of archetypes: reaction and withdrawal, defense and escape, visibility and hiding all mirror each other in the opposites of nature.

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Mercury influences the style of our consciousness, learning, assimilating, and approaching the world intellectually, through the reflective capacity of the mind. Mercury's condition in our charts tells us more about how we see life from a mental perspective, what the senses receive first, and even what we tend to notice immediately. Mercury is the creator, the thinker, the filter, the magician, and the mind at the same time. It has numerous disguises and shapes. A difficult fox to catch, Mercury is needed if we want to perceive life through a unique and individual perspective, escaping the rigid and traditional messages of Saturn.

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Mercury and the Moon represent the eternally shifting nature of the imagination and the mind: mixing colors, states, emotions, and thoughts into a mélange, chaos, order, cosmos. These shifting archetypes keep the essence of the soul always active, even volatile and unstable. Mercury gives speed, changeability, lightness, and finesse. The Moon gives erratic emotions, irrationality, cyclic changes, transformations, and cosmic consciousness.

[psycheastrology]

Venus is the factor of projection in relationships, the eros that binds connections and things together by love. Through projection, the hook of infatuation and love is thrown, aimed randomly at the next unhappy mortal to be afflicted by this madness that we call love. Jung speaks of eros as the connective archetype in the psyche. Eros is the connective principle of relating, of being related to something or someone, for only in relation can we know the soul and ourselves. Relationship is the differentiating experience par excellence, the experience of getting to know the difference between you and me, self and other.

[psycheastrology]

When Chiron turns retrograde, our psychological wounds become activated and seek consciousness and awareness. It is a reflective time as to how we are wounded and how we may sublimate or come to terms with that wound. It is a moment of inner work, growing consciousness out of the places where we feel hurt, small, and in danger of psychic erasure, the traumas that we carry in mind, psyche, and body.