Mermaid at Midnight: Melissa Mankins

March 3, 2013

So how is the effect of five planets in Pisces right now grabbing you?

I’ve been surprised at how powerful those metaphorical ocean waves have been, as Mercury retrogrades in Pisces. But you may also be experiencing the rigors of Saturn's retrograde in Scorpio, which Portland astrologer Tony Howard has a great piece on.

In honor of all the misty, murky, and haunting Pisces energy floating around, this week I’d like to highlight the photography of one of my oldest and dearest friends, Melissa Mankins. She and photographer Claire Flint Last recently opened the Paper Moon photo studio in the colorful Whiteaker neighborhood in Eugene, Oregon.

Melissa’s photography has a particularly poignant, subtle quality, a way of capturing the emotion of longing and the fantasies of childhood. I selected her beautiful image of a dancer’s reflection to represent the element of WATER in the gallery display on my website. Zeroing in on Melissa’s strongly-placed Venus in Pisces, conjunct the past-life point or South node, can tell us a lot about the source of her artistic vision.

With any artist or any client who aspires to be an artist, I tend to look at Venus first. Venus shows personal taste, and can reveal a fund of knowledge about the native’s artistic potential. Melissa has Venus in hazy, sentimental Pisces. This tells me a number of things. First, Pisces is particularly susceptible to art – or TV and movies, any medium which takes the hard edge off reality. Pisces can get lost in a world made of dreams, and so Melissa’s taste might tend toward the highly romantic and grandiose, or art that partakes of fantasy and exalted feeling states.

Watery Venus in Pisces is also in the watery fourth house. In astrology, the element water signifies the realm of mysticism and the emotions. Earthy art might make pronounced use of materials (think ceramics), while airy art appeals to the intellect or one’s social conscience (art with a message). Fiery art forms are bright and broad and awaken the passions (a sexy fashion spread in a magazine). So what about water?

It’s said that those people with a high ratio of water in the chart think in images. Think about what happens when you wake from a dream: you might not remember the words that were said, or the plot, but you retain an image, or two or three. You also remember the feeling, even if you forget all the other details – and you might not be able to put this feeling into words. What happens when you see a photograph of yourself at an event from the past that you’ve erased from your consciousness? The memory of that day and how you were feeling come flooding back in a way not possible if someone had only brought up the event in conversation. With a picture to look at, you remember that the dress you were wearing that day was too tight and that it made you feel a little self-conscious. You remember the smell of popcorn in the air and the feel of sweat on your skin. You remember the admiring glance of a stranger and the simultaneous rush of embarrassment and attraction.

This is how water works: it evokes the subtle realms, the psychic plane and the underworld of emotions for which we have no words. It’s tied to the imagistic world of memory. The fourth house is the most private house in the whole chart, and shows the inner world of the soul, our psychic home. Traditionally, the fourth house shows our tribal or family heritage, as well as the circumstances of our childhood home. But the fourth house is also our own personal midnight, who we really are in our innermost core.

Melissa’s fourth house Venus tells me that she’s an artist in her soul. Now one in every twelve people, roughly, is going to have Venus in the fourth house, and one in 144 people will have Venus in the fourth house in Pisces. It’s not rare, and not all these people are artists. But there will always be a certain exquisite sensitivity, a certain elevation of the inner world and an ability to respond to its innate beauty and subtlety, with anyone who has this placement. In the type of astrology I practice, the fact that Venus is also conjunct the South node in Melissa’s chart gives it a whole heap more importance. The South node shows the dominant theme of the past life.

For a few years, Melissa was studying to be a nurse. This career path is not inconsistent with a Venus in Pisces. Generous Venus is exalted in compassionate Pisces, and this placement can indicate feelings of universal love for all humanity. A nurse spends her day administering to those in need of care, and there is an association with Pisces and service, and charity to those who cannot help themselves. A simple way to read the past-life story in Melissa’s chart is to say that she was a nun in a former life. Mystical Pisces can connote Christian love, and Venus in the private fourth house suggests a cloistered life characterized by devotion. In history, nuns were often the only ones who would administer to the gravely ill and those beyond the pale of medical help. But the South node also shows a place where we got stuck, a limiting pattern that we need to move beyond if we are going to continue to develop.

We are always moving toward the North node in the chart. The North node represents something untried, a future point which we must access and develop if we want to reach our highest potential. The North node is always 180 degrees opposite the South node, and it is always scary because, karmically, it’s new territory for us. Melissa’s North node is in the hyper-public tenth house. In the tenth house, we are something larger than ourselves: we become a community figure, often a community leader. It’s no surprise that actors and politicians tend to have a lot of tenth house planets. Somehow, even without consciously willing it, tenth house individuals come to represent some segment of society and its desires and needs.

So while Melissa is most comfortable at home (fourth house), and pursuing her artistic sensibility in private, she’s also enduring some intense karmic pressure to come out as a public figure. While the South node signifies an old piece of karma which we don’t need to repeat, it also highlights some energy we’ve mastered and can offer to the world as a gift. Melissa brings the gift of her nuanced, emotional, and private world to her public life as an Artist, capital A.

One of my most vivid impressions of how Melissa’s sensitive vision impacts the public occurred at a gallery opening and artist talk she gave in 2011. Her photos were essentially fashion shots, as she photographed models wearing the creations of designer Allihalla (all the photography featured in today’s blog is the product of that collaboration). Yet the images are more reminiscent of Waterhouse paintings than fashion photography, drawing from that numinous Piscean well of longing and fantasy. As the small group of art patrons admired Melissa’s photographs, one older woman was moved to tears, and spoke about how evocatively Melissa had captured the spirit of a woman’s youth with her lovely shots. Venus in Pisces in the fourth house, that mermaid at midnight, gives Melissa’s photographer’s eye its moving and mystical quality. Explore Melissa's photography website here.

Bouguereau, Heavenly Mediocrity, and Neptune in Capricorn

February 24, 2013

Welcome to my new website, launched when the Sun was in the first degree of Pisces and moving into a conjunction with ethereal Neptune in the Year of the Snake, 2013.

I’m woefully verbose as a writer, and always have been. I can’t ever remember, in my perpetual years in school, having turned in a paper which came in under the suggested limit. Call it the effect of my well-placed Mercury, my chart’s ruler, in literary Libra in the expressive fifth house, trine garrulous Jupiter in Gemini. To paraphrase a line from one of my favorite comedies, my Mercury is "kind of a big deal."

But since I find my previous blog posts a little exhausting to read for their exhaustive length, my goal for this new site blog is brevity. Yet I have the sinking feeling that I’ve already violated this condition quite before I’ve even properly begun.

I’m dedicating this first blog post to the French painter, William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905), whose oeuvre I mined for images to enhance the description of my “Psyche’s Gift” series of readings. I’m a bit ashamed to say I’d never heard of Bouguereau prior to trolling the internet for depictions of Psyche. But there’s actually a pretty good reason for this: Bouguereau was on the wrong side of Impressionism, post-Impressionism, and other late nineteenth century modern art movements. Though he was enormously successful and popular, boasting a career which spanned over fifty years, his otherworldly skill and classical (read: conventional) themes were sacrificed to our lust for neat historical narratives. In other words, he was criticized by the avant-garde and thus functionally erased for posterity. Read more about the suppression of the legacy of this prolific painter here.

The planet I want to highlight from Bouguereau’s natal chart is that striking Neptune in Capricorn. This single placement can tell us so much about the lush, ecstatic feel of Bouguereau’s paintings and his subsequent damning by history.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, born Novemver 30, 1825, in La Rochelle, France, at 4pm.

I’ll start off by sharing my own reaction to Bouguereau’s collection of over eight hundred paintings, many available to view here.

When I look at his work I feel enchanted and exalted, the sort of state one expects to enter upon being confronted with Great Art. No mere mortal painted this, I think. Truly the photographic realism he applies to his divine and angelic subjects is a god-given talent. Liz Greene unfolds Neptune’s rulership over this redemptive and religious quality of art in her massive tome, The Astrological Neptune:

Art and magic are closely allied. The power to make something out of nothing, to create worlds from the elusive stuff of the imagination, is an act which – even to those who regularly engage upon it – partakes of a numinous element. The artist has always held a special and ambiguous role in myth and legend – as prophet, outlaw, mouthpiece for the gods, tool of daimonic forces, and victim of both human and divine retribution. The mystery of creative power is increased by the taint of theft, for the artist’s ability to make something out of nothing transforms him or her into a god, thus encroaching upon the jealously guarded preserve of heaven. Prometheus’ terrible fate is as fundamental to the myth of the artist as is his ennoblement as divine culture-bringer.

I also find Bouguereau’s paintings quite erotic, and there is precious little on this feature of his work for the armchair internet historian to gather. I think the closest I came to finding a discussion of the erotic quality of his work is a comment by that arch-villain in censorship, Anthony Comstock, who claimed absurdly that Bouguereau’s "Nymphs and Satyr" was edifying to him personally, but hanging in a bar in New York the painting promoted lewd and lascivious behavior!

Well let’s take a look at this painting. For twenty years it hung in a New York night spot (the blurb above is taken from King’s Handbook of New York City of 1893). The nymph in the foreground is showing us her posterior in a strong light and is partially bent over. The nymph behind her has her breasts pressed against the satyr’s resisting arm, and the space between their naked nether parts is filled by what I can only assume is a particularly long and bushy tail for a goat. I’ll give my husband credit for noticing that the third nymph has a pretty robust grip on the satyr’s horn, and her arms are thrown back in a state of wild abandon, elevating the breasts.

I’m sure Anthony Comstock found this life-size, roughly eight-by-six-feet painting edifying in the extreme. I still find it erotic. As some of you may know, Capricorn is an earth sign, ruled over by stern and commanding Saturn whose symbol is the goat. But the goat’s long-time association with sex, satyrs, and Satan himself gives us some indication of the other side of Saturn, as does the Roman holiday “Saturnalia” which was celebrated with total sexual license. Both sides of Capricorn appear in Bouguereau’s artistic vision – the rigid champion of convention and the impish and sensual satyr.

The planet Neptune rules over religious and mystical experience, and the mysterious propensity art has to waft us up to these exalted realms may be counted as one of its domains. In the goatish and eminently methodical sign of Capricorn, however, Neptune’s store of grace and unbounded vision is said to be unhappy, and unable to really flourish within Capricorn’s need for order and usefulness. Some writers would even call Capricorn the sign of Neptune’s Fall.

Yet Bouguereau’s oeuvre represents a perfect marriage of Capricorn values with Neptunian experience. Bouguereau is known as one of the most talented painters to ever limn the human form. Capricorn is the architect, the builder of the zodiac, and Saturn has general rulership over form and structure. In medical astrology, Saturn’s domain is skin and bones – the building blocks of the human form. Bouguereau’s divine ability (Neptune) to execute the human form (Capricorn) gives his paintings a magical quality which is both sensuous and numinous. The eroticism of his paintings is a direct result of this; his themes are Romantic, i.e. Neptunian, but their depiction is accurate enough to class Bouguereau as a Realist, where many critics in fact place him. I can’t help but think of Neptune’s twentieth century passage through Capricorn, from 1984-1998, when the pornographic film industry exploded. Neptune rules over film, and all mediums which promote escapism and release, and when it passed through earthy Capricorn there was a visible trend toward crass commercialization of the flesh in the film industry.

The most Capricorn aspect of Bouguereau’s style appears in his classification as an Academic painter. Neither an early nineteenth century Romantic nor a late nineteenth century Realist, Bouguereau’s style borrows from both these movements, producing a synthesis known as Academic painting. “Academic” is a very Capricornian word, suggesting prestige, tradition, convention, training, and the domination of the status quo. As Fred Ross notes in the ARC link above,

[Bouguereau] won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1851 at the age of twenty-six, and after winning nearly every accolade and award imaginable for an artist of his time, ultimately become the President of the Academy, Head of the Salon, President of the Legion of Honor. He was in fact, considered the greatest French artist of his time, and Paris was the center of art world.

Bouguereau was no starving artist, no malcontent shivering in a garret, no iconoclast with a theoretical ax to grind. He rose up through the ranks of the French Academy (Capricorn), until he achieved the ultimate Capricorn goal of arriving at the summit of the mountain and being the top in his chosen field. He worked in conventional, classical themes and in a style that was generally acceptable to the public. He didn’t push the envelope.

And because he was a symbol of tradition and conservatism, Bouguereau came under the attack of late nineteenth century modern artists, who tarred him with the brush of "mediocrity." There’s something to this – ever tried to penetrate to the top of your field by being an iconoclast and pressing your pet agenda? Typically you’ll never arrive until you learn the value of tact, formality, and respect for the middle way - and so "mediocrity," derived from the Latin for "middle," is a Capricorn word too. It's the quickest way up the mountain of public acceptance.

Neptune rules over Christ-figures and martyrdom in general, and later generations of artists and art critics crucified Bouguereau for the very technical excellence (Capricorn) and academic synthesis (Capricorn) which made him such a giant of the nineteenth century art world. His reputation has been redeemed (another Neptune word) in recent years, though much of his rightful place in art history has been sacrificed (Neptune) to the more compelling emergence of modern art within the same historical period.

So much for writing a short blog!

Venus and Friends

October 3, 2011

Part of what I'm interested in doing with this blog is making the language of astrology more accessible to people who just want to learn about it in a desultory way. Not everybody is ready to sign up for a class or commit to some serious book-learnin'. One of my first teachers, Karen McCauley, used to have me just feel the energies of the planets we discussed, or meditate on them, which, at the wise old age of nineteen, I assumed was a waste of time. But in the many years that have passed since those first classes, I've found that when studying astrology, just vibing with the energy of a particular archetype is the perfect complement to reading about the planets and the parts of our lives that they rule. You can't even really begin to use astrology in any personally meaningful way unless you can connect to how the different planetary energies feel.

Today's lesson is dedicated to Venus. When we think of the planet Venus, we typically think of love, and that's a good place to start. But romantic love can draw on a lot of other parts of our psyches that are not strictly Venusian. Sex (Mars), power (Pluto), high romance (Neptune), trust (Saturn), emotional neediness (Moon), and exchange of ideas (Mercury) are some of the many other components to a relationship which might get us into a Venusian mood in the first place. We're not usually inclined to kiss someone that we don't trust, or to whom we're not attracted! So what is Venus really about?

Venus makes us feel good, plain and simple. It's an integral component of the equation for attaining those elusive states, FUN and HAPPINESS. In astrology, Venus is given rulership over two signs, Taurus and Libra. In Taurus, we see the face of Venus that is primarily concerned with PEACE. In Libra, we meet the part of Venus that is given over to BEAUTY. I think peace can sound a little dull to younger ears, like a still-point, a no-action zone, an emptiness. Think of Venusian peace instead as those periods in your life, or those moments of the day, when nothing is wrong. For chronic worriers like Cancer and Virgo, or ambitious signs like Aries and Scorpio, or intellectually restless Gemini, such moments may be rare indeed. But we need them, desperately - they are balm to the soul, the everyday graces that make us feel like life is running smoothly and going according to plan. Another simple way to connect with Venus is to think about those parts of life that are easy for us. Do you have a beautiful, comfortable home (Venus in Cancer)? An effortless faith in God (Venus in Sagittarius)? A dynamite relationship with your co-workers (Venus in Virgo)? Or a seemingly endless fund of artistic inspiration and creativity (Venus in Aries)? In each of the examples named, it's all too easy to overlook the magnitude of the gifts we've been given. Venus in Virgo: "Sure I have an easy time at work, but I'm not cute enough to attract a partner." Venus in Aries: "Sure I'm burning up with ideas, but when will the recognition - and the money come?" The trick to mastering Venus is to find contentment in the things that are going right. Venus is about wanting what you already have.

If Venus is sounding a little lazy or unambitious, then you're cluing into another facet of the planetary energy. Laziness can be a danger of too much Venus, and foster the sense that we're so beautiful that we don't have to look after our health, or the conviction that the values handed down by our parents were good enough and don't require any adjustment, or the belief that life is just fine the way it is and there's no sense in trying to make it better. Venus can become stuck and resistant to change, just like the rest of the archetypal energies. But it's my firm feeling that in the West, we don't place near-enough emphasis on the higher expressions of Venus. Sure, lots of people get addicted to money and security (the negative stereotype of Taurus), but then these people aren't really connecting to high Venus either: they're not enjoying what they have beyond the having of it.

You'll notice that the Empress card in the Rider-Waite Tarot deck features the Venus glyph. In the Tarot, the Empress augurs a time of sensual indulgence and relaxation, a period in your life when there's time to make love and cook a sumptuous meal, and chat the night away with good friends and a bottle of wine. Take a break, the Empress says. Smell the roses. Come home from work early and look your lover in the eyes. Though Venus can function as shorthand for money in the chart, most of the activities I just listed don't cost very much. Human connection is free. Ditto the beauty of the natural world. Playing with a child or a beloved pet just takes time, as does cooking a delicious meal. There's something to the old adage, "The best things in life are free." High Venus is a state of mind, an attitude which allows us to see the beauty in the things that are right in front of us, and to discover peace and joy in the way things are.

One of my favorite Venus words is "local." We might dream of one-day storming the New York literary scene, but Venus is about being satisfied with being the best poet in Peoria. Healthy Venus is thinking that the local offerings of people, entertainment, and opportunities are just as good where you stand as they would be in the next town, or across the ocean. Wise Venus knows that you can just as easily get enlightened in Fresno as Tibet. Venus is the "here" and the "now" in Ram Dass's immortal formulation, "Be Here Now." Astrologers wax eloquent about the spiritual capacity of Neptune, Saturn, and the Moon, but what about chipper little Venus and effortless, everyday happiness? How spiritually advanced or juicy can we really be without ease, grace, and personal comforts? How much would our lives change if we really loved all of who we are, however humble or small we judge ourselves to be? To quote Oriah Mountain Dreamer, "What if the question is not why am I so infrequently the person I really want to be, but why do I so infrequently want to be the person I really am?"

As you can see, we've wandered from romantic love to self-love, which is another way of describing the state of being happy with who you are. Venus is associated with romantic love because it allows us to see our own beauty through another person's eyes. Some people just make us feel good - or wonderful or gorgeous or hilarious - and typically we have Venus contacts with these people in chart comparisons (called synastry). So does Venus rule over those heart-pumping grand passions that lead us to dramatic, Romeo-and-Juliet-style expressions of our love? Well, perhaps, with a little stimulation from the trans-personal planets or the South node. But sustainable Venus in action is more along the lines of, "Every time Billy comes into the coffee shop where Carrie works, it puts a smile on Carrie's face." Billy sees the best in Carrie, so Carrie sees the best in Billy. "She's so easy to be with ..." is something we hear a lot from people who are falling - and people who are still - in love. It's another way of saying, "I can open up my whole self and she still likes it! And I reward her for this generosity of spirit by allowing her to be who she is." We don't usually think about any of this consciously, of course. But we get a clue to how Venus operates in our lives when we notice the activities - and people - which put us in a good mood.

I've been sustaining some pretty heavy outer planet transits to my Venus these past few years, and so I thought I'd share my own personal story of taking Venus gifts for granted. Several years ago I did a chart reading for an acquaintance who has since become a celebrity. She's drop-dead gorgeous, so much so that I could easily put aside my own Venusian pride in my appearance when I was in her presence, because it was just so thrilling to orbit her radiance. When I'd tool around Los Angeles with her, the reactions she got were incredible. Not only men but straight women would fawn all over her and make every effort to please her. I'll call her Betty for the sake of convenience. Even before Betty was in films or on magazine covers, she was treated like a celebrity, and she graciously accepted this treatment.

I was tickled when I cast her chart and saw that sexy Venus in Aries was smack-dab on Betty's Ascendant. Venus in the Mars-ruled sign of Aries gives off epic sex appeal, and Aries ain't shy about putting it out there (neither is Betty). The placement of Venus on the Ascendant just ups the ante in terms of how widely that sex appeal is going to radiate. The Ascendant is one of the most visible points in the chart, and so any planet there is on prominent display: in Betty's case, her feminine endowments were her calling card. A first house Sun in Taurus contributed to this charismatic picture (first house planets can't hide their light), with earthy Taurus softening the potential for masculine harshness that comes with Aries rising.

So here I was, in truth fawning a little bit over Betty and singing the praises of her Venus rising, and noting how neat it was that the goddess of beauty was elevated in her chart, since Betty herself resembles Venus incarnate. Now I had noticed that gloomy Saturn in Cancer was squaring that Venus in the natal chart, but Betty was happily married, and about to embark on a career in which her Venusian body was the key to getting jobs. I read the Venus-Saturn square as the challenge of turning personal beauty into a business, and thought that that was that. Overall she was very happy with the reading, but when I asked Betty if there was anything else she wanted to talk about, she floored me.

Her face and mood changed, and a note crept into her voice which told me that this was one of the deep pains of her life: "Why can't I keep any female friends?" All in a flash I had one of those astrological revelations which let me know that my own filtered perspective had crept into the reading and led me to miss something. I have Venus in its own sign of Libra, in the outgoing fifth house and trine expansive Jupiter. I have to struggle not to make friends so I keep enough time for myself and my projects. Friends? It took me a moment to even comprehend Betty's question. Friends? Who except the extremely smelly and socially inept has a problem making friends? I'd never thought about making friends before. I can be stiff, shy, and stand-offish, and I still make and keep friends in spite of some natural awkwardness. How could a woman who looked like Betty help but have a whole gaggle of friends? As it turned out, she'd had so many negative experiences with female friends, and suffered so many betrayals, that she was extremely reluctant to trust women at all (Saturn square Venus). I stumbled through an answer to her question but probably made a mess of it because I was so shocked.

I learned a lot about Venus that day. I learned that one of my own natural Venus gifts is the ability to attract and keep friends. As proof that I'd always taken that talent for granted - I'd never thought about it before Betty confessed her own struggles in the world of friendship! I'd never had to. I'd set up my life so that I always had a ring of people to celebrate my accomplishments with, or commiserate with me over my woes. I never lacked for folks to invite to movies or parties or happy hours. A fifth house Venus in Libra can mean a lot of things - like a dangerous propensity for falling in love with love - but it wasn't until after Betty's reading that I really appreciated my own Libran friendliness and gift for forming relationships.

Now the savvy astrologer will have already noticed that the Aries, first-house emphasis in Betty's chart can be productive of diva syndrome - Aries is extremely self-focused, while Libra, its opposite, is other-focused. Saturn in Cancer in Betty's chart also makes it difficult to show tender feelings and neediness. So without knowing exactly how all of Betty's friendships went south, it's easy to guess that her natural talent for self-promotion (her very star quality) struck her friends as self-centered, and her Saturn in Cancer would have prevented her from letting those friends know just how much she cared. It's easy to feel eclipsed by Betty's radiance, and so the friends in question might have betrayed her out of jealousy, spite, or anger over their unmet needs. Betty's Saturn in Cancer also tells me about her high sensitivity level, and how these broken friendships probably wounded her in a way that might not have phased someone with more social experience. In spite of her exaggerated Venusian beauty, Betty seemed to be lacking in that higher octave of Venus - balance and reciprocity in relationships - as suggested by the placement of her Venus in competitive Aries.

Friends are usually not the first thing astrologers think of when discussing the role of Venus in a chart. We're far more focused on Venus as an indicator of romantic relationships, self-esteem, personal resources and even hobbies (i.e. what you like to do for fun). But I think our friends tell us a little something about all of the above. In most cases, your romantic partner is also your best friend, and the values of our friends reflect what we think is important about life. For the first time in my own life, I've really had to think about what kind of friends I want, and why, and how one goes about attracting them. Check the status of Venus in your life by thinking about your relationship to your friends. Do you feel at home with them - at peace and relaxed? Do your friends reflect your values - at least in part? Do you feel like you have no friends at all, or so many you have no time for yourself? Just a little reflection on your own experiences with friendship can yield loads of information about how much Venusian joy you're letting into your life. We work out a lot of karmic baggage in partnerships, but friendships are supposed to be fun - that is, Venusian - most of the time. If your friends aren't stimulating your personal sense of peace and beauty, then perhaps it's time for an upgrade. Change your friends, change your life. And if you take nothing else away from this post, remember that no one person can have Venus everywhere in the chart, and that even the pretty people have Plutos and Saturns.

Astrology will surprise you ...

September 26, 2011

Recently I was at a gathering at which a young astrologer wailed, "Uranus is opposing my Moon during my prime child-bearing years!" Now I don't want to shame her, there's reason to be concerned here. The implication of her lament was, "Uranus, god of accidents and sudden change, will prevent me from getting pregnant (symbolized by the Moon) or from bringing a child to term." Or worse, heaven forbid. But should that Uranian transit prevent her from trying, if she's feeling the call of motherhood? The evolutionary answer is - no! Don't let the projection of the transit's worst manifestation stop you from actualizing your heart's desire.

Here's why: astrological transits rarely conform to our expectations of worst-case scenarios. If they did, we'd all be dead. Many people have lost their mothers, suddenly, under this transit's influence, and others have lost children to accidents so bizarre they seem "fated." This is sensitive territory. But I would guess that just as many people fell in love during this transit to their natal chart - for the first time with someone of the same gender! Or finally managed to swing a job at a not-for-profit company. In the first case, Uranian (progressive, surprising) sexuality is opposing (coming from the outside, often symbolized by the impact of another person) one's emotional life and sense of home. I realize this is somewhat of a non-standard interpretation - in the astrological literature. But in practice, astrology is truly a Uranian art in that it will surprise you with the myriad and endless ways energetic symbolism can come to life on the material plane. In the second example, political consciousness (Uranus) has welled up to the point in the individual that he feels pressure (the opposition) to feed his soul and sense of home (the Moon) by switching to a career whose basis is an ethic of care. A transition at work - with a Uranus/Moon transit, the by-the-book astrologer asks? Sure! Many natal Moons feel at home at work (Virgo, Capricorn, Aries) and airy Moons (Gemini, Libra, Aquarius) could be stimulated by this transit to become more authentic (Uranian) to their inherently egalitarian natures. Confused yet? That's part of the point.

I've found, increasingly, that transits manifest in individual lives as uniquely as dream symbolism is to the individual psyche. Though the transits always carry a piece of the inherent symbolism (in this example, Uranus opposing the Moon), the transit's specific manifestation might be unrecognizable from one individual to the next. The energies we are working with here are vast and cosmic and pure; manifestation on the material plane, conversely, is small and narrow and, for that reason, infinitely variable.

Let's play a game. What are all the bad things that could happen to you when Uranus transits your Moon by opposition? Lightning strikes your house and burns it down (Uranian shock to the lunar nest). Your husband leaves you (someone else's Uranian independence whacks your sense of security). In the case of my friend who's concerned about getting pregnant, let's really ramp up the negative imagery. Expensive, intrusive technology will be required to facilitate the pregnancy (Uranus is associated with cutting-edge lab work). The mother will suffer an accident while pregnant. The fetus will be diagnosed with a debilitating illness and she'll be forced to terminate while it's in the womb. The baby will be born with two heads. And a tail.

Writing that bit of sorcery felt absolutely awful. But isn't it better to state our worst fears than to let them fester because a nay-saying astrological tradition waved its finger and said, "don't get pregnant right now"? Shame on us astrologers, I say, for not having more creative and constructive interpretations for this transit. Let's think of five WONDERFUL things a Uranian transit could mean in the context of pregnancy. 1) The baby is born premature, but healthy, and the parents are continually shocked and surprised by all the odd and capricious ways the little bundle finds to express itself. 2) The mother develops psychic communication with the child after getting pregnant, and talks to its spirit. The onset of this skill is sudden (Uranian) and permanently alters the mother's emotional mood (Moon). Uranus is weird, after all, and symbolizes New Agey phenomena that the Muggles can barely get their heads around. 3) The mother can't conceive, but by a strange chain of events she is good friends with her husband's ex-girlfriend, and the ex-girlfriend is willing to be a surrogate, and even though just - nobody - understands this arrangement, all the major parties involved are happy and pleased with the outcome (Uranus = strange and progressive social relationships). 4) The poor way the mother is treated at work after getting pregnant inspires her to become a legal advocate for the rights of pregnant women in the workplace (the politicization of motherhood). 5) And, finally, the least exotic and therefore one of the most likely outcomes of pregnancy under a Uranus transit: The woman in question gets pregnant and suddenly feels free. What - you cry! Free! When saddling herself with twenty years of work and more? Yes, free. She's always done it everyone else's way, and now she's got her own kid and is the ultimate authority over that child's life. She's free to express her beliefs and understanding of the world, free to try her own educational methods on the child, free to open up the nurturing side of herself that had been dormant up till now. Paradoxically, pregnancy and motherhood prompt a radically authentic expression of her emotional nature.

I think it is the ethical astrologer's job to let astrology surprise us. Every day. You'd be shocked at how often astrologers discard perfectly rich and legitimate information from the client because it doesn't fit a textbook description.

Engage that part of your mind you would open up at an art gallery, or a Mahler concert, or a dream group, and let the symbols speak.