Blog
Everything revolves around the Sun. I have always delighted in that phrase. Long ago, half-legendary Hermes Trismegistus crystallized the entirety of astrological theory in four simple words – “As above, so below.” Saying that everything revolves around the Sun embodies that Hermetic principle perfectly.
- Above, in the sky, the Sun is the gravitational center of the solar system.
- Here below, on earth, it is the gravitational center of your head.
On both levels, the Sun’s job is to hold the planets in their courses – and by “the planets in your head,” we mean all your contradictory, paradoxical needs, drives, and values. Being human is complicated. We’re pulled in so many directions, torn between appetites and integrity, pleasure and productivity, and so on. Still, you get out of bed in the morning and you have a sense of who you are. You have an identity. There is reasonable continuity in your life. That’s the Sun at work, with its “gravity” coalescing you into one reasonably coherent whole.
Like most astrologers, I tend to be in awe of Pluto and Neptune as they make their stately, slow-motion passages through houses, signs and aspects. In doing that they illuminate the broad symphonic development of our lives over years and decades. With experience, we soon learn that they can knock us for a loop, sending us out of one relationship and into another, or into a new career, or off to live in a different part of the world. We can say the same for the other slow-moving planets – Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter – as well as all of the progressions and solar arcs.
Heading sunward toward the center of the solar system from the august realms of the outer planets, we cross the asteroid belt and enter a far more frenetic zone. Like a carousel that's drunk one more cup of coffee than it should, Mars, Venus, and Mercury zoom frantically around the Sun – and around our charts. They’re powerful triggers, but what they actually trigger are those bigger developmental themes that were signaled by the slow moving bodies. Right there, we see one of the bedrock practical principles of working with planetary transits: the distinction between the fast bodies and the slow ones, so beautifully punctuated by the asteroid belt.
Development-over-time astrology – the kind of astrological work some people call “predictive” – has a lot of moving parts. Transits, progressions, and solar arcs are enough to keep most of us busy, both as astrologers as we try to keep track of them, and even more so simply as human beings as we live them. In every chart, there’s always a lot going on all the time, in other words – too much really for the human mind to collate. Part of the art of surfing these waves of astrological complexity lies in taking a “first things first” approach – don’t sweat the small stuff until you’ve sweated over the big stuff. And when it comes to the big stuff, there’s nothing bigger than the progressed Sun.
The progressed Sun is the Evolving Self. As it moves through the chart, ever so slowly the lessons of life make it through our thick skulls and become part of what we are. We change at the most fundamental level.
Of all the things the progressed Sun can do, the most important ones are when it switches from one sign to another or from one house to another. A close second would be when it forms a conjunction with a natal planet, followed down the “poker hands” of the rest of the aspects. Any one of these events is virtually guaranteed to change the direction of your life.
Many of you reading or hearing these words have no interest in making your living as professional astrologers. A lot of you are here for reasons of simple interest or personal growth. That’s fine – everyone is welcome. But one thing is nearly 100% sure – if word gets out among your friends that you are studying astrology, some of them are going to ask you to have a look at their charts. Before you know it and probably without even intending it, pretty soon you are practicing astrology.
Where will that process eventually lead? Who knows? It’s easy to say that the choice is yours, and that is mostly true. But it’s not really quite that simple. As you master evolutionary astrology, you begin to have a kind spiritual superpower. And with that power comes certain ethical imperatives. If someone is drowning and you are the only person who can swim... well, you see where this is going.
As July opens, the Moon’s north node lies at just under 20 degrees of Taurus. By the end of the month, it has retrograded (the Mean nodes are always retrograde) to just over 18 degrees of Taurus. That’s a swing of about 1 degree 35 minutes.
Do you have any particular astrological sensitivity to those degree areas – say, the Sun in 19 degrees of Scorpio (an opposition) or the Moon in 19 degrees of Aquarius (the square)? If so, is the karmic wave about to break for you? Is something huge and fated about to happen?
Maybe. Maybe not. Read on.
Every 18.5997 years – that is just a little over every eighteen years, seven months – the transiting nodal axis completes one cycle through the Zodiac. The south node returns to zero degrees of Aries, in other words. Another way to express this is that the lunar nodes spend about a year and half passing through each sign.
In my experience, don’t count on these nodal transits to correlate reliably with anything big. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. I’ve seen them pass pretty much unnoticed and I’ve seen them rock people’s’ worlds. For an example of the latter, Will Smith’s natal Moon lies in 21 degrees 8 minutes of Scorpio. When he lost his temper and hit Chris Rock at the Oscars last March, the transiting south node was in 22 degrees 2 minutes Scorpio – bull’s eye, in other words, smack on his Moon. The south node was conjunct it and north node opposed it – in that very emotional moment. What kind of unresolved Scorpionic karma was welling up from his psychic depths? Was he hitting Chris Rock or some ghostly figure from the past?
Whatever the answer, that edgy, Scorpionic moment will mark his public image for the rest of his life.
