Blog
Following are some keywords and concepts about the fourth house to help unlock your creative exploration of your own - or others' - fourth house placements.The Fourth House: Key ConceptsKey Words and Concepts: Roots ♥ Bonded Relationships ♥ Radical Commitment...
On Friday evening, May 26, in Seattle, I presented a keynote talk. The title of my talk was one of my favorite subjects – “Reconciling Astrology and Spirituality.” We’ve put the talk up on Youtube. You can watch it here:
Thinking back, maybe I should have titled this keynote address “Reconciling Astrology and Spirituality (or trying to.) It’s not always easy!
In my twenties, I wrote my first astrology book – one that never saw print. It was basically a statistical study attempting to prove astrology in a scientific way. If you’re interested, I spoke of it in a bit more detail during the keynote. I bring it up here because one of my (many) rejection letters from publishers contained a line that I’ve been wrestling with ever since: “The thrust of modern astrological publishing is egocentric and I suspect it will remain that way.”
Yikes! Do we actually “resemble that remark?” Sad to say, the answer is often yes. There’s no shortage of silly ego-flattery in pop astrology – telling people what they want to hear and neutralizing any desire in them to improve themselves. Often such astrology encourages people to blame their problems on everyone else or on their “bad aspects.” In every case, it’s “me, me, me” – and that’s the definition of egocentricity.
As August opens, the Sun is in mid-Leo faithfully advancing about one degree per day. Meanwhile, Venus is retrograde, having made a station near the end of Leo back on July 22nd. That means that the Sun is going forward and Venus is going backwards and that they’re locked on a collision course. The two finally come together in a conjunction on August 13th. That happens in 20 degrees 28 minutes of Leo. After that, Venus will continue to move backwards until September 3rd, forty-three days after turning retrograde. By that time, the Sun will be well into Virgo.
Built into that ho-hum recitation of dates is one of the most mysterious, elegant mysteries of our solar system: the Venus Pentangle. It will take us a few steps to understand it, starting with the fact there are two distinct types of Sun-Venus conjunctions – inferior ones and superior ones.. Most astrologers, myself included, don’t make much of a fuss about their differences, but maybe we should.
Think of an archery target with concentric rings. The Sun is the bull’s eye. The first ring out is Mercury’s orbit. The second is Venus’s orbit. The third one is us. Mars orbits further out in space, so it would be the fourth ring, and so on, out to Pluto and beyond. When Venus is lined up halfway between Earth and the Sun, we have the inferior conjunction. But then sometimes Venus aligns with the Sun from the opposite side of its orbit – that’s the superior conjunction.
On July 12, the Moon’s Mean north node, always retrograde, leaves Taurus and backs into Aries. That means that the south node will cross into Libra at the same time. They’ll occupy those two signs until January 28, 2025 when the nodal axis shifts into Pisces and Virgo. As ever, they’ll leave an indelible stamp on the headlines – and on your own life too.
Here’s a quick review for anyone who’s not been studying evolutionary astrology for very long. The Moon’s nodes are really the heart of the system. The south node represents unresolved karma that has ripened – that means that it’s time to deal with it. The good news is that you are ready. Meanwhile, the north node suggests a powerful, effective antidote to those old, outdated south node patterns. Here’s where it gets sticky – that south node behavior comes up pretty much automatically, while reaching the north node always takes serious effort.
Rumors of a new world order emerging due to Pluto’s passage into Aquarius have been exaggerated – at least for now. For one thing, the Lord of the Underworld is now abandoning Aquarius (which it only entered on March 23) and returning to Capricorn, where it’s been stirring up chaos since 2008. That reentry happens this month, on June 10. Once back in Capricorn, Pluto will actually remain there for the rest of the year. We’re not out of the Capricorn woods yet, in other words.
On October 10, after four months, Pluto reverses course and turns direct, but it’s still in Capricorn when that happens. It only reenters Aquarius on January 20 of the coming year.
Even then, we’re still not in the clear. On September 1, 2024, Pluto crosses briefly back into Capricorn a second time. That will only be a quick goodbye kiss – just forty days later, it enters Aquarius solidly. After that, it won’t be finished with Aquarius until early 2044 – and it won’t touch Capricorn again until February 28, 2254.
