The other day, an email came floating into my inbox from a website called Care2, a green-styled corporate site purportedly dedicated to saving the world, claiming 12.5 million subscribers. The subject header of the email read, “Monogamy vs. Polyamory: Do Open Relationships Work?”

View from train bridge, Rosendale, NY. Photo by Eric Francis.

Naturally, I thought: this ought to be pretty interesting.

The writer gave her analysis a title like a boxing match or a legal case. Mono versus Poly is now in session! All Rise! The article commenced as such (literally, its first words): “Non-monogamy is about one thing — sex. And sex is good.”

(You can tell she learned her writing style from The Bible.)

It went downhill from there, fast. Faster than I ever thought possible without jet propulsion and a lot of lube. “And sex with different people — either concurrently or over the course of a lifetime — is good too. Sex is so good that some people are addicted to it. Sex makes people do crazy things and it makes people feel amazing things. I love it just as much as anyone else, but there is more to life than sex.”

When you see the word ‘but’ you can usually tell how things are going to go. Her premise is that since polyamory is about sex, and since sex isn’t everything, polyamory is nothing special to concern oneself with. The author, whose name is Polly, continues: “I am pretty sure that the words on your deathbed won’t be, ‘I wish I had had more sex with more people’. Maybe if you’re a pervert, or if you didn’t get much action in your life, you would say that, but most people wouldn’t.”

I will spare you any more. This article, while one of the less eloquent and less favorable recent mainstream reviews of polyamory, shares one thing in common with every other article on the topic that I’ve ever seen: it sets polyamory and monogamy against one another as irreconcilable opposites.

While the author is less tactful about her prejudices, she does us the favor of expressing them overtly: for example, there is in many discussions the lurking suspicion that people who don’t claim orthodox monogamy are perverts, but the word is rarely used. Or they don’t really like relationships, and can’t handle intimacy; they just want to get laid. Facing these prejudices repeatedly is enough to push nearly anyone who tries to be openly polyamorous back into the closet.

Social prejudices about polyamory emphasize the sexual aspects of the experience -- which seems to represent the fantasy or desire most project onto the idea.

Yet I wonder what the real issue is. Studies done over the years on the incidence of cheating reveal that 45% to 65% of women and 55% to 80% of men stray outside monogamous commitments.

The variance is because some studies ask whether people have ever cheated while in a monogamous agreement; some ask whether they have cheated in their current relationship. Other studies show that women tend to understate their sexual conquests, and men tend to exaggerate. The two stats may be much closer than the studies show. Neither sex has a claim on fidelity.

In any event, we’re talking about a large portion of the population whose definition of monogamy has at one time included, and possibly includes today, sex with more than one person. For a fast check, ask yourself: do you know anyone who hasn’t been through this at least once? How about three times? How abut five?

Notably, the accepted definition of monogamy has changed in recent decades from one partner for life (now considered archaic), to one partner at a time, as often as you feel like moving on. That’s a big difference. The revised term is ‘serial monogamy’, but I prefer to think of it as serial polyamory: we tend to have multiple partners, one at a time (that is, while we’re not having multiple partners, two or more at a time).

By any realistic description, some versions of monogamy sound a lot like polyamory. Those who are proponents of monogamy at all costs, who advance the cause of abstinence-only until heterosexual marriage for life, sound like they are in reaction to the observable data, which basically proves that most people are simply not that way; that, and living in reaction to their own feelings. So do a lot of romantics, cruising for The One. True, there are some who choose a mate for life. For some this actually works beautifully and for some it creates misery. In any event, we only know their story up until today. We don’t know about tomorrow.

No matter how we experience relationships, I would propose that there are more similarities between what we call monogamy and what we call polyamory. For one thing, they both involve modes of relationship. No matter what the outward style, relationships boil down to a one-to-one meeting between two individuals. Those meetings are set within a larger context with many complex interrelations: a community.

That community either supports the relationship or it weakens the relationship. The relationship either offers something back to society, or it does not. Who has sex with whom seems to be incidental — except for one thing, jealousy. I won’t say much about jealousy in this article, except I would state upfront that in my view, if one issue is choking off the potential of the human race, choking our relationships and doing incalculable damage to sex, that’s the one.

From Self to Self: The Inner Origin of Relationships

But let’s go back to the egg. One must be a self to have a relationship with someone else. Being a self implies an inner awareness of existence, which is a relationship to existence that is in truth a relationship to self. The quality of this core relationship determines nearly everything that follows. No matter what kind of external relationships you engage in, your primary relationship is to you.

Naomi from the Book of Blue. Photo by Eric Francis.

How do you feel about your existence? Do you love yourself, judge yourself, hate yourself, struggle to ‘be yourself’? What threatens you and what makes you happy? To what extent to you take ownership of your life? What threatens or enhances your sense of existence? How do you relate to death?

And, a kind of operative question that results from all of these: why do you want to be in relationship with others? What is your motive? Most of us want relationships, but we have different drives. Is the reason to share pleasure, learning, and food? Is it to share work and a mission? Is it to exchange misery? Is the purpose to seek completion in another, or to explore your wholeness with another? Is the purpose to protect you from something or to celebrate and explore a sense of safety? Do you seek love or attachment?

Each of these themes appear to be mediated by one’s relationship to oneself. Each individual brings an agenda into the pairing, and that agenda is internally mediated. It’s usually based on a level of maturity and experience in life, and one’s level of awareness. In other words, you decide and express your agenda in a relationship based on your relationship to yourself. Notably, this is the relationship that we typically seem to lose sight of when we’re ‘in a relationship’, which might feel like losing one’s independence or sense of identity.

Many people feel like they’re a ‘different person’ when they’re with a partner, and ‘go back to being themselves’ when a relationship splits up. This is a sign of inner fragmentation.

Our inner relationship is the real thing that most of us struggle with, most of the time we’re struggling. Even if we think we’re struggling in a relationship, what we’re actually struggling with is a relationship with ourselves. If we could figure that out, we would have fewer problems and more solutions. We would know where to look for those solutions.

From One Self to Another Self: Dyad as the Basic Bond

One subject that rarely arises at polyamory conferences (the places polyamorous people come to talk about relationships, make friends and exchange information) is monogamy. I mean, it’s mentioned, but the topic of the depth of one-on-one bonds is secondary to the issue of how things are doing with the other partners, the rules of engagement with other partners, and so on. Rare is it to hear open conversation about the need to relate one-on-one or the need to be in an exclusive relationship for a while. You meet couples at polyamory conferences that are monogamous before they branch out, but I’ve never met a couple at a conference that was choosing to keep their relationship exclusive.

Crystal and Benji. Photo by Eric Francis.

I think that most people who identify as polyamorous know this and honor when others do this, but individual relationships seems to play second fiddle in poly culture when in fact, so far as I can tell, they are the second most basic foundation of poly culture. The very most basic is where one stands with oneself; and the second is the quality of our one-on-one bonds.

Now ‘monogamy’ and ‘polyamory’ have a second key element in common: they both use dyadic (that is, pair) bonding as a structural basis. Strong dyads share the same basic properties, no matter what the style of relationship: they are based on agreements; they are based on honesty; they are based on a desire to share; hopefully they are based on love.

Relationships have a purpose, and they express that purpose within a tribe or community. Remember that marriage, our society’s most basic and seemingly most coveted bond, is often performed in a public ceremony, officiated by a public official (traditionally by a minister, a judge, the mayor or a sea captain). The community is generally invited as witnesses.

The relationship is presumed to have public implications and the marriage license is a public document, filed with the city clerk. This suggests that the pair bond is part of something larger: society or a community and often, a family.

Relationships involve a contract or agreement of some kind, even if that is just to be together. Whether they’re happy affairs or not usually involves whether the individuals involved feel that the agreement is honored; whether the individuals get their needs met; and whether the arrangement works for both people. These facts apply whether the relationship is heterosexual or homosexual, whether the individuals are members of the same race or economic class, or whether they are of similar or very different ages.

Most of us would agree with “whatever makes them happy.” Whatever makes us happy, if we can arrange it. Whether the individuals involved choose to have sex with other people would be covered by all of these concepts.

The Many: We All Have Multiple Relationships

One thing does not change, whatever kind of relationship is involved: those individuals relate to other people. Unless they are really, really lonely, they love other people and other people love them. Partners in healthy monogamous relationships have loving relationships with others. One bit of revisionist history is that the ‘nuclear family’ is the basic unit of society: parents and kids. Until recently, these relationships were set within a complex social structure called the extended family. The dyad was part of a much larger structure that included many kinds of loving relationships.

Humorous postcard explaining how complicated relationships are, which (if you don't read the words) also gives a picture of the human networks surrounding any couple. Author or "curator" seems to be Adam Sicinski.

Referring back to the beginning of Polly’s article (polyamory is all about sex), the truth is our relationships are always about so much more. It verges on hilarious that someone would accuse polyamorous people in particular of focusing on sex; poly folk spend so much of their time obsessively involved with the details of their relationships it’s amazing they have any time for cooking, much less for sex. But even the ‘let’s meet at the motel for a quickie’ kind of affairs have a way of becoming deeper emotional involvements.

Yet even if we presume sexual monogamy — someone who only has physical sex with one other person, for a long time — we all have bonds and commitments with others. Some of those, while ‘nonsexual’ in the physical sense, can be profound, intimate and long-lasting connections. Imagine a man is married, in a healthy relationship with his wife. He also has a secretary who has worked for him for 20 years, and they love and trust one another deeply. They haven’t shared sex, but their bond of love is as powerful as that of any marriage. Most people would not call that polyamory; I would.

And most of us have extremely active fantasy lives. Fantasy knows no bounds; yes, some people feel guilty about it, but that usually makes it so much hotter. And fantasy takes us outside the bounds of monogamy.

One thing I’ve always found interesting is that monogamy has many rules that don’t involve sex. Some monogamous couples do not ‘allow’ one another to have close friends of the opposite sex. Some monogamous people feel threatened when their partner has any friends at all. Some don’t ‘allow’ their partner to go to community college. Some feel threatened when their partner checks out a cute guy or girl, and some encourage one another to be open about their attractions and even their erotic fantasies, unfettered. Others would be profoundly threatened by this. Still others invite their friends to have sex with them.

Since nearly everyone has sexual desires and fantasies about others, the core issue running the show — that is, the thing that determines our choice to have more than one partner, and whether to be honest about it — would seem to be jealousy. Everyone gets jealous at times; some make a religion out of it. Some make it their dharma to work through it and be free. Those who dwell on jealousy relate to others with a different set of presumptions and expectations than those who process it in a healthy way. As it turns out, in an attempt to avoid the jealousy issue, a great many have sex with others without telling their partner about it. In other words, from what I hear, many people would openly want or admit to being with more than one partner or lover if jealousy were not in the way. One common equation is, “I want to be sexual with someone else, but I’m not going to because you might, and if you do, I will be jealous.”

When we talk about polyamory, what we’re really describing is an agreement to take up all the boundaries of a relationship consciously, rather than applying a term that seems to presume the nature of those boundaries, but more often denies their existence. In other words, polyamory is what we talk about, more than what we do. Most people choose to remain silent about their sexual reality.

Why ever would we do that? Well, since your first relationship is to yourself: ask yourself.

Compersion Letters from Planet Waves Readers

“Suppression of the natural sexuality in the child, particularly of its genital sexuality, makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, good and adjusted in the authoritarian sense; it paralyzes the rebellious forces because any rebellion is laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual curiosity and sexual thinking in the child, a general inhibition of thinking and of critical faculties. In brief, the goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation. At first the child has to submit to the structure of the authoritarian miniature state, the family; this makes it capable of later subordination to the general authoritarian system. The formation of the authoritarian structure takes place through the anchoring of sexual inhibition and anxiety.”

Wilhelm Reich, from The Mass Psychology of Fascism

Genevieve Hathaway and other astrologers on board Planet Waves have researched these transits, drawing on the full repertoire of my writing, and many readers have added their thoughts. I’m truly looking forward to this stage of the writing — these are the foundations of book chapters, as are the Cosmic Confidential 2010 readings.

Please keep your feedback coming. There is a page on the Planet Waves blog devoted to that.

We have just opened up all pages on the Cosmic Confidential member site to comments without having to log in another time.

You are invited to enter comments and questions.

Also, if you would like to offer feedback to the public about CC, there is currently a blog entry on the front page of Planet Waves where the comments are collecting.

One last: for those with a blog who would like to review the project, you’re invited to do so. Please write to me directly at dreams@planetwaves.net with the word REVIEW in the subject header, and I will send you some information.

Many thanks for making this project such an amazing success.

Yours & truly,

Eric Francis

I had worked for months on the 2010 charts and much longer for some leading into 2011 and 2012, but the process that started to unfold first was Mars retrograde in Leo. That was the bit that started making words, easily, because it seemed connected to a motor; that would be Mars and Leo, two fiery energies we need to employ if we want to get things done.

It was working out Leo Confidential that I discovered that Mars is asking a question: What do you want? Midway through Leo, I burrowed into the Abraham-Hicks material, which basically says that wanting is what drives the human universe. Not the American economy, but all events; and that things go better, not worse, when we want consciously.

Metaphysical ideas are rarely proven, but they are demonstrated through use. Abraham’s message seems to be that without wanting, nothing happens except a lot of mishaps; then we figure out what we want and convince ourselves that it’s possible; and then we usually get there. In the end, contact is made through desire; success comes from wanting it enough to do something about it. Without the actual wanting, the alignment of desire, all the action in the world will not do anything.

To work with this idea, one must move through and sort out a few taboos. The Buddhists have cursed wanting as the root of all suffering. The Christians have cursed wanting as the root of all sex. The purists within capitalism have cursed wanting as the thing that is filling the ocean with plastic. But is it really? If we wanted to use glass, we would.

Intent seems a purer concept; more politically correct. I might want to eat her pussy, but do I intend to? Stated that way, it would take about ten times longer to get there, if it happens at all. Intend seems like a papered-over way to say want. Think of it this way: someone says to you, “I want you.” How do you feel? Or they say, “I intend to have you.” You have more power when confronted by someone who simply wants.

For about a year (at the suggestion of a colleague) I’ve been applying the concept of intent to my artwork. When I did, I frequently kept coming up with a non-compute. Actually, I also kept coming up with the legal definition of intent, leftover from my journalistic specialty, fraud. Intent seems simple, but from a legal standpoint it means that someone knew or should have known, or should have suspected, that their action or lack of action might have a given outcome. “It doesn’t mean desire,” said Paul Merrell, the lawyer who explained the concept to me.

If you’re a school administrator and you put 1,300 students into a dormitory knowing that it’s contaminated with dioxin, you may not desire that they get cancer, but you certainly know, should know or should suspect that they might get cancer: and therefore you are acting with intent. Meanwhile, your job description promises everyone that you’re acting to keep them safe. Intent is too complicated for a kid or a dog to understand; impossible for an administrator. No wonder they pave roads to hell with the stuff.

But wanting, stated in the clear ideas of Abraham, was a more useful idea. If I ask myself, I know what I want. And Mars retrograde in Leo seemed to be asking a question: What do you want?

I counsel people and I counsel myself and I have friends and we all sometimes struggle with stuff: and as I surveyed this prairie, I began to notice that some people know what they want and some do not. Sometimes I know what I want and sometimes I don’t. When I know what I want, I have something to work for, or strive for, and my life is better. I have an aim, and I can put my intentions behind that (in the conventional use of the concept: a purpose). But the wanting comes first and the intent piece comes second. Without that inner engine, there is no drive; and the driver has no way to get there; there is nowhere to get. Many people you see really, really struggling have had some damage done to their ability to want. Usually that damage involves guilt.

Another day, I’ll relate that to Pluto in Capricorn: which is here to help us burn through the psychological and emotional guilt complex that is killing us with its toxicity and preventing us from determining what we want: which is what Mars retrograde is helping us determine. That is a crucial question right now. Do we want a better society? Do we want better lives? How do we define that, and have we questioned those wants/desires a few times?

While I was poking around the Abraham material in support of Leo Confidential, I signed up for their daily mailings and the other day this came in. It helped clear things up.

As you begin to state what you do want, rather than clamoring about what you don’t want, you come into your own power. When you come into your own power, you feel better. And when you feel better — those who love you also feel better.

– Abraham

This is Cosmic Confidential, the 12th annual edition of Planet Waves.

It now exists, against some long odds: we’ve worked through Mercury retrograde, Mars retrograde, two eclipses and a lot of other astrology going off. Meanwhile, apropos of the moment, the news was a runaway train. It seemed like every time I would get settled back into writing, some other event was calling me to do the chart of God knows what and to be there for the Planet Waves blogging team, so we could fulfill our role as cosmic news desk and for some, psychic bomb shelter. But: your reading is done, and waiting for you.

Though Planet Waves is a news service, Cosmic Confidential is entirely about you. I have lavished attention on the individual sign readings this year, putting in at least double the time, energy and research as usual. My objective: how can I get as much high-quality astrological information into the hands of as many people as possible, for as little money as possible?

The readings are each about 4,500 words. Plus, each sign gets three pages of extra materials: generous selections from past annual editions, reader responses to my queries about how you’re living out your astrology, and a page of resources and out-takes. For many of the signs, I cut large swaths of text, but I’ve preserved most of them in the out-takes section, which gives an alternative view or covers a topic not included in the main reading. The navigation for these pages is across the top of your sign.

Each sign includes substantial information about professional and creative activities, financial strategies, and thoughts about relationships and sex: and all of it is focused on the theme of not just keeping your sanity, but rising to the occasion of a world gone wild.

That I can create this stuff without your birth date is a testament to what can be done with Sun sign astrology. I maintain that this kind of reading — a long essay on your Sun sign — is more effective and more useful than a “custom report” generated from a database. Even though you gave the database your birth date, no astrologer actually sees your chart; nobody takes up the whole matter of your reading holistically. Though I may neither talk to you nor see your chart, what you get from Cosmic Confidential is a whole reading of the planets as they really are, and as they affect you. The interpretations work with interwoven themes; they refer to real events; they combine natal astrology and transits beautifully, in a fresh and engaging way.

Cosmic Confidential is designed as an interactive community. Each sign’s reading is open for comments and questions. I will respond to as many of these as I can, so take a moment to participate there and share your thoughts, ideas and queries.

Then there are articles; these are on the main contents page. You can get there from any page on the website. There are more articles coming: I didn’t write one called “The One and the Many” (offering a new theory of relationships); I have not finished the transit readings (though they are researched and awaiting my final draft), and I haven’t done the United States charts yet. What’s up is fun and generous: my favorite is called “Everything Old is New Again.” There is a mini-series on Saturn. There’s a generous excerpt from Cosmos and Psyche, courtesy of Richard Tarnas.

Once you read one sign, you’re likely to want to read more. I have a suggestion: get the other signs before the price goes up, or upgrade to all 12 while you subscribe or extend your subscription to Planet Waves. The combined offer (Planet Waves plus all 12 signs) is truly the best deal, in a time when pennies, dimes and dollars count: but not as much as quality.

Cosmic Confidential is designed to be a lasting resource: astrology for a world on the edge.

Let’s start with a reminder: astrology is a form of divination. It is not a science and it is an odd sort of art; it’s the kind of art we expect life to imitate. As a writer of fiction and nonfiction, I assure you that it finds its home somewhere in between the two. I am using the charts — many of which are published here — as the outline of a story. This is the interpretive part. We all agree that the chart is there. Astrologers don’t all agree what belongs in a chart; I use a lot of current discoveries. The story charts tell is up to the storyteller. That would be me in this case, but then you respond to that, and tell yourself another story based on what I offer. I have done my best to leave my margin notes in the articles; that is, to tell you what aspect I’m interpreting. My opinion is designed to cast the issues in a way that is helpful. I try to state problems in a way that lends itself to solutions. But with astrology, we are all making up stories.

Portable astrolabe, set for the latitude of Paris.

Beware you’re doing this. Pay attention to the narratives you tell yourself about your astrology, and what they are based on. In my method of reading charts and telling stories, I take the role of creative problem-solver and inventor. Knowing something about what people go through, and how people in my society (which I consider to include the U.S., the U.K. and Europe, all places I have lived) think, I design ideas that get us around the usual psychological pitfalls, and offer alternative ways to view our lives.

When I predict, I try to be archetypally predictive, explaining the basic conditions and presenting options. I don’t say, “You will get a great new job,” but rather, “This is a good time to make some changes in the work that you do, and move toward what you want. This is a good time to rethink your notion of what a career is.”

This is going to be an unusual year; it’s already shaping up as one. The astrology stands out in part because we are in the midst of so many slow-moving planets changing signs around the same time. Within a two-year span between 2009 and 2011, Jupiter, Saturn, Chiron, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto will all be making sign changes. That is quite a cluster.

For those of you who follow transits a bit, this presents a completely different reality than the long-familiar Uranus in Pisces, Neptune in Aquarius, Pluto in Sagittarius setup. These are all nervous placements. Two of them are in mutable signs and one is in Aquarius, where the energy can stay nervous and seem to go nowhere fast, forever. Uranus is heading for Aries and Pluto is well into Capricorn, and these transits have turned the energy up high. The Uranus-Pluto square of 2012-2015 is already crackling, and we will have our first full taste in early June when Jupiter and Uranus form a brief conjunction on the Aries Point.

Writing the horoscopes this year was a daunting task. It’s never really easy; yet I don’t ever remember it being more challenging (I am sure this was exaggerated by Mercury retrograde during much of the work). I feel like I had to relearn astrology from the beginning. There are so many new factors to consider, in the midst of which we have Mars retrograde in Leo. In many ways I have depended on the movement of Mars more than the other transits, because I think that it gets to the heart of the matter, which is determining what we want.

I am using this as an alternative concept to ‘intentions’, which is a concept so ambiguous and wrought with controversy that I have trouble explaining it. I am suggesting we use the word desire, which is simple enough for a kid to understand, and quite useful for an adult to understand. If we pause to ask ourselves what we want, we would be a lot better off. You could not have a better symbol of this than Mars retrograde in Leo. This aspect falls in a different house for each of the signs, and therefore it tells a different story.

The Mars event coincides with a conjunction soon to take place in the first degree of Aries, which rings with the same theme: the focusing of desire, and in the case of the Aries Point and Uranus, the desire of a very large group of some kind. Large, like a population.

While I was working out the Leo interpretation, I recognized this subject from the Abraham-Hicks material, which I love but have long resisted because it seems to defy logic. Or rather, it defies one kind of logic (that of a limited world where we believe nearly everything is impossible) and introduces another: metaphysics based on desire. Astrology concurs that Mars and Aries are the keys that fire up the initiative of our cosmos, at least on this level.

For each of the signs, I have done my best to factor in or directly interpret Mars retrograde in Leo, Pluto in Capricorn, the Chiron-Neptune conjunction in Aquarius, and the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Aries. When possible, I have tried to synthesize these transits into a unique interpretation for the point of view for each sign.

In addition to the main interpretation, each sign includes three additional pages: excerpts from the prior three annual editions; samples of interviews conducted with readers from the given sign; and a page of resources: in most cases, the chart for the Sun entering that sign, the short version of the annual, and any out-takes I had left over after writing the interpretation.

At the bottom of each page is a comment area where you are welcome to leave your questions, comments and requests for clarification, which I will do my best to answer. I am curious to see how these interpretations work for you. Please let me know.

For many years, but particularly the past two years, your life has been dominated by outer-planet transits: the Gods of Change. I am speaking mostly of the long trek of Uranus in your sign, which is thankfully something we only go through once in a lifetime. This has been the eminently restless energy of the past seven years, that sense of being on the edge, all the time.

To make matters especially interesting, Saturn has been in your opposite sign for the past two years, presenting you with a stabilizing factor in your environment: it might be a job or a relationship or a commitment of some kind, but it’s held your feet on the ground the past two years, and not without tension. We humans have this delicate relationship with gravity. We depend on it, but we constantly want to defy it.

Uranus is good for that. It’s energy is forward thinking and comes on fast, and in bursts, and can have rapid, even revolutionary effects. Saturn brings focus, discipline and rigor: this has not been easy. It’s been challenging to remain stable during transits like these; I trust you have learned something about maintaining stability no matter how weird things get, and at the same time, the potential offered by real change.

Before that, you had some Pluto in your life. Through the late 1990s and up ’til 2008, Pluto was in Sagittarius, a mutable sign like yours, burning across your Sagittarius angle: your reputation, career and sense of mission. I could not think of a transit less like the nature of Pisces than a fiery Pluto transit across this house. Pisces is introverted. That was anything but introverted, compelling you to be out in the world, part of the world, and in a sense to shape the world, no matter how you felt on any given day.

Uranus was a bit like this too, constantly pushing you out of any shell, rock cave or comfort zone you thought you could hide out in. Suddenly we find ourselves with Uranus transiting out of Pisces into Aries (a process that will last for a year, beginning in June). Along with Pluto, the gods of change have moved off of the mutable cross (where they affect you the most) and onto the cardinal cross, where (as we are seeing) they can take up their work with the entire planet.

But Jupiter is still involved. Jupiter will be in Pisces for most of the transition, with another year of spectacular aspects that will keep you on your feet. It’s incredible, really: and my job in this reading is to help you ground this energy, and make the most of it. So, turn on your brain, spark up your intuition and let’s do some astrology.

Pluto in Capricorn: The World Moves Over For You

As a Pisces, you are used to adapting to the world. This is not to say that you lack influence; you have more than you think. But what you are not as accustomed to is the world adapting to you and your desires, needs and intentions. I will cover another aspect of this in greater detail in the Mars retrograde section, though there is a potent message coming from Pluto in Capricorn, your solar 11th house. Consider this theme running in the background of everything else I write about in this report.

Pluto in Sagittarius was here to teach you how to create and hold a vision for your life and for your work. You have likely learned more about this than you think. Pluto in Capricorn is here to give you some traction in the world. That is, to teach you that the world is malleable and subject to your energy, your concepts and your design scheme. The world changes, and you are in a rare position to benefit from those changes. Indeed, the world, despite the resistance that it seems to put up, bends far more easily than we imagine, if we know how to align our desires with our choices and our actions.

Imagine the seemingly solid substance of Capricorn, which can manifest as structure, or as concepts with their history in the past, bending and even crumbling under the influence of Pluto’s presence. While Pluto is certainly disruptive in this sign, stressing out nearly every system you can name and lots that you cannot name, the energy is distinctly rejuvenating. Therefore, stick to what is new; focus on what you want to create and allow Pluto to get everything, and to a real extent everyone else, out of the way. This includes people who have ‘institutionalized’ themselves in your life — but whose presence has only served to slow you down.

Most important, you need to constantly renew your vision; to work with current editions of your hopes and dreams; and to never, ever believe that someone has authority over your plans and your ideas. You are that authority.

Out of the Hidden World

While there’s been no shortage of spectacular events involving Pisces planets Jupiter and Neptune, this has been happening in Aquarius — your 12th solar house. This is a hidden zone in your solar chart. As 2010 unfolds, the changes you’ve been creating within yourself will manifest in the visible, tangible world.

My repeated references in various horoscopes to events developing behind the scenes relate directly to this: for example, the triple conjunction of Jupiter, Chiron and Neptune that unfolded last year took place in this house. Yet the hidden realm is vitally important to Pisces: in a sense it is your home. Of all the signs, yours has the deepest connection to the parallel dimension, and the work you do there is truly potent in its ability to create psychic templates that you can then build on in the ways more often thought of as ‘reality’.

We often wonder how it is that people believe that thoughts can manifest as reality. Yet little else actually does. Think of it this way. My grandfather Jim, who was a draftsman, used to remind me that everything you see has a drawing to go with it. Without a drawing, very little comes into being: be it a paper cup, a hat, a disk drive, or a chocolate bar. Your 12th solar house is the place where you do your engineering, appropriately enough, in the sign Aquarius.

In Next World Stories, I quoted a friend named Mimi, who describes this veil as a scrim. I’ll quote her passage from last year’s annual again, as a reminder, since it sums up so much.

The 12th house is a scrim; a veil. This is not the same as the Klingon cloaking device that makes the mothership coming at us invisible, but the way that, on a stage, when one uses a scrim it makes the actors behind it, and their world of action, into the ‘other’ realm of soul, turning them into not so much unreal actors as archetypal ones. They ‘become’ their character.

In theater, masks hide the face to reveal a deeper essence. The scrim of the 12th house works/plays the same way: by revealing. This is the key to the 12th house. It is the scrim that reveals, that a scrim is necessary to see certain things, the way that people who read auras deliberately close their eyes halfway, creating a ‘scrim’ of their eyelashes and eyelid to be able to read the energetic, vibrational essence of the aura.

What’s the Aquarian drama playing behind the scrim of the 12th house? What can we only see when we “scrim” it? Is the 12th house the scrim of the 1st? Of ego as our only idea of the self, and we need a scrim to get us to see our aura, the quality of our cosmic vibration? Aquarius as new — a new aura? Vibrating at a new cosmic pulse/pattern as we approach the (infamous) 2012? Now that we are in ‘the chaos point’ is Aquarius supporting us in seeing the vibration of chaos as taking us into the future?

Aquarius and Pisces is a visionary combination, and this is where the creative process of your life has been developing: for a long time, as Neptune has been creeping through Aquarius for a full decade.

The Jupiter-Chiron-Neptune alignment in Aquarius that lasted through 2009 drew you behind the veil, into your drawing room: in the sense of withdrawing to a private space, and the ‘incorrect’ sense of drawing a design on paper. You lived behind the scenes of your own life, orchestrating your own future. This brought you into alignment with something that you may not have noticed yet, though the signs are evident. If you’ve noticed, you can trust that its initial effects have been subtle.

Aquarius represents patterns, and the 12th has an insecure quality, when viewed from the perspective of normal ego consciousness. That’s why we tend to deny its properties so often. It is not easy rewriting thought patterns or rooting out sources of deep insecurity, though that is precisely what you’ve been up to.

Neptune has held you to the task for a long time, making sure that you focus on what is so easy to overlook; making sure that you confront your sense of isolation; and that you orient your intentions and your willingness to grow on long-term objectives. There is something here about holding out faith in the impossible, or at least what has no guarantees.

Yet while you’ve been doing this, you have felt your potential growing, even as you wondered how you would ever live up to it. As Chiron and Jupiter arrived, others could see that potential, but part of you remained blind to who you were and who you could be. It’s almost like you’ve been at a fireworks display wearing a blindfold. You hear the pops in the sky and smell the smoke; all around you people are saying oooh and aaah. But it’s like: where are the colors?

Then, gradually, you started to see them with your eyes closed. You saw them within yourself by developing another sense, an inner sense that at times you may have questioned or denied. Imaginative perception is tricky that way: one can never be sure if an idea about oneself is ‘true’, or if an idea about the world is a ‘good idea’. Learning this kind of discernment is not easy. And fortunately you are still focusing this skill — even as so much else moves outside the scrim, into open view. You’ve taken significant steps toward embodying this inner sense, and even depending on it.

The hidden quality of these developments suddenly changes into something more tangible as Jupiter emerges from your solar 12th house and enters Pisces, fresh from its meetings with Chiron and Neptune. Yes, your meeting with Jupiter signifies an authentic meeting with good fortune; with expansion; with a sense of worldly adventure. Think of this as you suddenly embodying much that you’ve learned in your inner world and wanting to express it in your outer world, no longer an idea or a concept, but as an embodied experience.

Then later in the mid-spring, Chiron begins its transition out of Aquarius, spending part of the year in your sign: yet another way to say that what you have been learning and preparing for in the back rooms of your consciousness is finding its way to the front of your experience. Note that this will be Chiron’s first visit to Pisces since the 1960s. For any Pisces, this represents fully embracing the focusing power that is, in truth, the one thing that has helped you get anywhere in quite a long time; the ability to rise above the noise of the world and focus on your intentions.

So, first, a triple conjunction involving your two ruling planets. Then Jupiter entering Pisces; and then Chiron making its first visit to Pisces in two generations: big stuff, but it gets better.

The Discovery of Self-Esteem

There is something distinct about Pisces and self-esteem; let’s call it an issue. (I rarely use that word in my astrology practice.) Anyone who knows even just one Pisces native can tell you this. I would not say that Pisces lacks self-esteem: rather I would say that for many, the concept does not exist tangibly. It must be defined and discovered and developed consciously. Remember this: you cannot understand that you lack something that you don’t fully grasp; the issue would not be the lack, it would be your understanding and use of a concept.

Self-esteem is a 2nd house matter: for you this is Aries. When Uranus leaves your sign, it will end up in Aries for a few months this year; and Jupiter is going to cut clear across Pisces in about four months and end up there as well. On June 8, there will be a conjunction in your house of self-esteem.

This is a conjunction that’s going to change the world; indeed, it’s already doing so, months before it happens. For you it is personal on many accounts, representing an invention of self-awareness, identity and self-worth.

When I say invention, I mean this literally. The Uranus factor is often the creation or discovery of self-awareness and self-acceptance that did not seem to exist before. There is an economic angle: the discovery that something you’ve been doing has a monetary value that you had not noticed before then, or had not accessed before then.

It is not too early to begin this now. Practice seeing and applying the value and worth of what you do. Be a witness to the value of what you create, be it in ways large or small. Practice applying what you know. You have learned so much; putting it to use is the last and eminently necessary step for you. Note that this will be easier than it seems in your mind. Pluto in Capricorn is saying that the world is making room for you. Your concepts of community and culture are changing, though to you it may look like society is changing. Both are true, and you are at a fortunate meeting place of the two. There is just one catch: you must do the hardest thing for a Pisces, which is to maintain faith in yourself.

The action in Aries has a relative, which is Mars (the ruler of Aries) retrograde in the 6th house. Where Mars is retrograde tells us where we need to do the necessary preparation work to make that Jupiter-Uranus conjunction real.

Mars Retrograde: Work Smart, Not Hard

Contrary to the notion of Pisces as the lush, lazy slacker, astrology suggests that you radiate vitality: in particular, through your work and your drive for achievement. You have it in you to identify with your professional activities, and to shine in your chosen field. Your ability to get a job done is one of your most valuable assets; and you find your greatest stability in being productive and respected.

I know this sounds like most descriptions of Virgo, or Capricorn. Anyone who has had a Pisces boyfriend or girlfriend is potentially thinking, Gee that sounds great. Too bad it’s not true. My Pisces significant other/friend/cousin would be so much happier if that were really so; and I wouldn’t have to do the dishes all the time.

Mars is retrograde in your 6th solar house: work and wellbeing. The retrograde here is suggesting that you carefully evaluate your work patterns and more precisely, the way that you distribute and apply two things: your intention, and your energy. Mars and Leo are potent symbols of vitality, though Mars focuses the issue. That arrow points toward the thing desired. The easiest way to organize your energy is to aim for what you want; that turns out to be the easiest way to get what you want, and to accomplish what you want.

This has to do partly with how you manage your energy; and partly with how you define your purpose: both of which come back to your sense of value — mostly about yourself. In other words, when in doubt, ask if you’re worth the effort; or apply the effort and see if it changes your feeling of worth. Fortunately, this equation can work in either direction.

The energy reorganization attribute of Mars retrograde in Leo is about learning how to focus your desire in the here and now. I suggest you practice, when you remember — and practice remembering. This is the most efficient use of energy: to align with desire. Some of the more spiritually-oriented might prefer if I used the word ‘intentions’, but this to me feels like a third-degree abstraction of a simple concept: organizing your life around the outcome you want, and I do mean this in the smallest and largest ways, immediate and long-term. What is the outcome you want? Ask yourself 100 times a day if you have to.

Mars here is also suggesting that you find physical ways to vent your energy. Those can include sex, but better if they include other activities that you might not normally consider, such as martial arts; and anything that stirs up the energy in your body, works through the stagnant energy, and puts you into contact with yourself. The positive results will be obvious, and you will short-circuit many negative possibilities by having better access to your flow of energy.

This transit is reminding you that you must be in an environment where you are respected for what you do. Where one’s Sun is placed tells us a lot about where we must express our creativity and be respected; where Leo is offers another picture of the same quality. You simply must exist in an environment where you are respected for your work — and the catch here is that your level of self-respect will be reflected in the environment around you. If you don’t believe me, try an experiment. Evaluate what happens when your self-respect is strong and functioning, and when it is not, and see if there is a difference in how you are treated.

There will be times when you have to communicate about this directly; and using the Law of Mars Retrograde, look inwardly for what you want; then state outwardly what you want. Your ability to do this is mingled with your ability to access your sense of self-worth. Mars retrograde is the time to get this energetic spine in alignment: desire >> intention >>  statement of intention >> achievement. This formula not only saves work; at the end of the whole process of doing anything, everyone comes around to this method, no matter where they start. So you might want to start with this formula.

If you’re born under the sign Pisces and not already on this wavelength of achievement, the moment for a reassessment has arrived. You have had plenty of experiences in recent years that have given you a sense of your potential, and enough motivation to want to make it real.

The hint from the 6th, and not a modest one, is that the places to take charge are your desk and your diet. Consider this a winter project: one directed toward taking over your life in seemingly small ways, then letting that energy expand into more tangible experiences of life. Your desk, you can think of as your entire work life and creative process.

Competition and Cooperation

You may feel that it’s not in your nature to be competitive. You may feel like leadership is too much responsibility. You feel you’re too sensitive to handle too much responsibility. None of this is true, unless you make it true, which would be akin to making it up.

Though you’re a Pisces, your chart has fire in all the handy places: Aries in your 2nd house (self-esteem and resources), Leo in your 6th house (work and wellbeing) and Sagittarius in your 10th house (reputation, profession, leadership).

The action aspects of your chart involve making contact with the energy of fire. That is different than the energy of water — as different as it gets. So part of your challenge is about maintaining the awareness of both passion and sensitivity, sustained in the long run. This will require you to know your own points of conflict, immaturity and most of all, the famous sense that Pisces is a victim. Before you dismiss the possibility that you are a victim, you might want to determine just what you think you’re a victim of. Then you can apply logic and test your theory and figure out how to get yourself to a better place.

In assessing why Pisces is perhaps less like its astrological picture than any other sign, we could look at human nature as much as we could study the nature of Pisces. Humans tend to be lazy. We only hunt when necessary and we are conditioned to respond like something meaningful is happening only in the midst of a crisis. How many times have you heard of the person who doesn’t get their life together until after the big car accident or their bout with cancer or when their long-term relationship splits up?

This is a good question — and you can answer it in the affirmative, in a time when things are going well for you; a time when disaster is not a necessary prerequisite to focusing your life.

Many factors, from Jupiter in Pisces to the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Aries, to the Chiron-Neptune alignment in Aquarius are saying that you can now become a master of cooperation. Yet you need to motivate people, and part of how you’re going to do that is focusing your desire, followed by focusing team spirit. Let your competitive edge teach you to strive for excellence, but remember there will be times you need to be competitive. You may have to achieve something first; you may have to go someplace to make your mark or stake your turf. This may be in the context of business or a relationship.

Comment About Saturn in Libra

Saturn is completing its transit across Virgo, your relationship house; it will be back for a while midyear, and then resume its journey across Libra for the next 30 months. For you this is a shift from your 7th to your 8th solar house, and we could call this a dynamic of cooperation.

Saturn in Libra is beautifully placed, and you have Libra in a vitally important corner of your solar chart: your shared resources angle. Saturn here is calling on you to honor the necessity of cooperation, in both individual and group partnerships.

By taking inner authority over yourself, you will have exceptionally strong influence in your relationships, which you do not have to push. You merely need to work with, work in service of, and recruit people to your cause. Without ‘appropriating’ the resources of others, you have a passport into the dimension where all resources on Earth exist as some form of shared resources, for the good of everyone. It will be up to you to make the case for the simple truth of this fact, often with people who have far more direct access to resources than you have.

Pisces as the Last Sign

Part of the nature of Pisces is that it’s the last sign. As Chiron arrives here, we who live under strong Pisces influence would be wise to consider this distinction, so I’m offering this thought as my closing commentary in the Cosmic Confidential horoscopes.

Pisces not only carries all the collective baggage of the human race; we carry all the potential; and we often live as if we’ve seen it all. That is a reminder to not be jaded or cynical and to remember that there is new potential in every moment of existence. In a sense you are like the counselor who has worked at the same summer camp for five years, and who must make it fun for every new group of campers.

The world seems torn between the desire for revolution and the sense of how pointless it is to make a real effort. The truth is somewhere in between, and your job is to hold out the middle ground — the very wide middle ground — and allow for some of the better possibilities to manifest.

You are likely to be feeling more optimistic than ever this year, though beneath that is your usual stalwart realism (of which the ‘dreamy’ quality of Pisces is often a defense mechanism). Chiron in Pisces is going to remind us that we have reached the end of one particular game, of one particular mode of existence, and that we must open the way for another.

When I say that this will be a spiritual solution, I don’t mean that in the sense of a non-human or peachy outcome; I mean that the usual notions of cause and effect need to be suspended in honor of a more visionary understanding of karma.

Pisces has an unusual connection to the larger cosmic picture, which is a reminder of how small the world is after all is said and done.

Since the mid-1990s, Aquarius has been taking outer-planet transits one after the next. The inner planets (Venus, Mars, Mercury) are whizzing by all the time. The outer planets (Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) take a human lifetime or far more to orbit the Sun once, so when they show up to a sign, it’s a special occasion. And they have indeed been showing up for Aquarius: primarily Uranus, Neptune and Chiron. The latter two remain in your sign. If you’ve been wondering about the sense of not only constant change and movement, but also the pressure to change, you have a picture of the process with these planets.

Now that we’re out of the Capricorn eclipse pileup, we can consider how the two most significant events of early 2010, and which thus set the tone of the next four or more seasons, involve planets in Aquarius and its rulers; and this unusual sequence of events, focused on Aquarius and its planets, continues well into 2011. Interestingly, at each turn, Pisces is also involved.

Aquarius, as you probably know, is an air sign. But its symbol is that of someone holding a decanter of water. Anyone with a good first astrology teacher learns early on that Aquarius must first fill up the container, so that there is plenty of water to give out. With a continuous overlap between Aquarius and Pisces symbols, we have a beautiful image of you filling up on the emotional and creative essence of Pisces, over and over again, in many different ways. This tells us that you are moving from an idea of your role to the actual substance necessary to grant you the ability to serve. You are moving from wanting to have something that is of direct personal service into the fully ready state of doing so. You are moving beyond potential and into actuality.

Yet this is a dangerous path to tread: there are many things to stumble on, particularly your own tendency to hold to the ways of the past, even as you work your way toward the future. On your considerable agenda for growth, you might want to include the way you think of time, and the nuances of how you think of the value of what has come in the past; and how that influences how you envision yourself right now.

The Saturn-Pluto Square

No matter how you look at the current charts — using older forms of astrology, more recent traditional astrology or modern astrology, Aquarius is highlighted again and again. The aspect that all eyes are on is the Saturn-Pluto square, which puts the immovable object (Saturn, your traditional planet) and the unstoppable force (Pluto) in a tense relationship: only this time, the change is mostly an internal dynamic. The last time these two planets aligned was right before the Sept. 11 incident, and the response of most people, and of society, was not what you would have called reflective or introspective.

We as a culture are now being compelled to look within; and you in particular are being compelled to go deeper into your inner reality than you ever have before. Whatever events have recently transpired in your life, they are leading you into one of the deepest searches of your values in many years. This is not a theoretical quest about what might be important to you, under certain circumstances; more likely, you are being confronted with certain situations that are demanding your full attention and self-evaluation.

You may be encountering some of your deepest fears; you may be compelled to accept facts of your existence that you denied for years. You may be summoned to fully take on board just how isolated you feel in a world where you have so little in common with others, and so much to offer. I suggest you ask yourself how willing you are to really offer that which you know you can — and look at the motives for your level of commitment.

Through this, you may feel like you’re being broken open inside; that is, opened up and set free within yourself. The image is a little like having the attic cleaned, or more accurately, having many inner walls torn down and your space opened up, which gives you a sense of perspective. Amidst all the dust and rubble you may not be able to see the potential of the space, though here is where it will help to have an architect’s eye.

The truth is you are going through many different transits in an effort to liberate you from the inside out: from your great-grandparents’ DNA, from your family patterns, from a need to conform; acknowledgment of which is about seeing what potential you have now, and acting on it, now.

Focus: Pluto in Capricorn

Pluto in Capricorn, which is your solar 12th house — the house of ‘before the beginning’ and that which we easily deny, or are overwhelmed by — is dominated by the ancient energy of Capricorn. This suggests that beneath your progressive, person-from-the-future exterior is someone who is in many ways a deeply conservative individual. This, in part, explains the contradictory nature of Aquarius: the peace-loving agent of change; and the cautious defender of the status quo.

Pluto in Capricorn has plunged into your 12th house, your hidden or subconscious zone. This is the energy that is currently stirring you up on such a deep level: the feeling of being taken apart, and made to confront some of your darkest fears. This is a long-term transit; Pluto does not leave Capricorn to enter your sign even briefly until 2023, and it does not stay in Aquarius until 2024. So this is going to be a prolonged experience, with many peaks and valleys along the way. However, due to other transits, the era from now until around 2016 is by far the peak of the energy: and 2010-2011 is the big turning point.

Focus: Saturn in Libra

The other side of the Saturn-Pluto square is Saturn in Libra in your solar 9th house — the house most often associated with spiritual matters, the higher self, and your mental horizons. Saturn is suggesting that you remind yourself how little you know, and take the encouragement to find out. You have Libra in this house, which is a window into your tendency toward equanimity. You believe in fairness. Aquarius has a reputation for supporting social justice, which is a difficult value to live up to in the world. You might say it’s your objective to bring the earthly, well-understood concepts of justice to the highest level, and apply them on a global scale.

One problem with this placement is that those scales of justice can keep tipping back and forth: and Saturn is here to settle certain matters of both ethics and of personal growth. You are being called upon to go past the appearance of being concerned and get down to the nitty-gritty and guts of the matter. Your social theory is being challenged by what we might call reality: Saturn; and because Saturn is square Pluto, you are being pushed to reconcile your values with the challenging state of affairs on the planet.

Against a Backdrop of Constant Change

If there was ever a symbol for the phrase, ‘The only thing constant is change’, that would be Aquarius. Yours is a fixed sign, but the energy is constantly moving, and then it forms patterns that are difficult to get out of. One after the next, since around 1996, outer planets have been blazing through Aquarius: first Uranus, then Neptune, then Chiron; and many small, meaningful ones as well.

Let’s consider that where I went to university — SUNY-Buffalo, a major research sci/tech center — did not even have a computerized card catalogue in 1986, you get a sense of the shape of the world. Now if you have a password, you can look up books in that same library from your iPhone.

The world has taken many technological surges forward, but there is no well-accepted philosophy to apply something like ethics to the issue. We rarely consider the human factor. Meanwhile, we all have exponentially more information to process.

I am sure you’ve considered the ways that this is changing our brain chemistry and structure. You might say we are all being Aquarized.

During these powerful Aquarius transits when technology has taken over, we have become increasingly detached from our bodies and invested in abstraction. A certain masculine quality has taken over reality. It’s not really masculine in the true sense of rationality; it’s more like the high fructose corn syrup equivalent of concentrated psychic obsession. We communicate more, but what do we say? For you the form of the question is: we change more, but what do we become?

Your charts suggest that what you are moving toward is activating the feminine side of your brain. There is an embracing of women’s wisdom suggested in your charts; a return to the priorities of the home and the economics of the home; an embrace of a circular (as opposed to linear) thought process. The wisdom you are moving toward is not based on information; it is based on natural intuition, which in our version of the world must be learned, or re-learned.

Embracing the Wisdom of the Feminine

I have written much about the Jupiter-Chiron-Neptune conjunction in your sign, which is now down to the last stage — Chiron conjunct Neptune, exact through February. This may be the best opportunity of your life to clear away the false ideals of the past, and the antique values of the past: which is to say, to be yourself right now. We know you’re a philosophical person who exists in a world of ‘harsh reality’, and notably, where relatively few people care about actual ideas.

I have a new interpretation of this aspect for you, though before I go there, I want to share a few additional thoughts on Pluto going through your 12th solar house, Capricorn.

To me this seems, as much as anything else, to be about unlocking an ancient database of traditional wisdom, which as usual you will strive to turn into applied science. This arrives with a deeply introspective, at times solitary, journey deeper into yourself; deeper than ordinary thought is possible of accessing. The levels of past wisdom that you access inform your thoughts and your ideas, helping you bring in the next generation of practical concepts that will help the world grow out of its current tantrum of technological adolescence.

In order to tap this wisdom, you will need to make many subtle reorientations in your life, a process you began long ago but which is at full strength right now. The essence of this process is a kind of interiority: literally, listening to yourself. This necessity is showing up in your relationships right now, due to Mars retrograde in your opposite sign.

Yet several asteroids clustered together with the Sun on the day of the Sun’s ingress to Aquarius gave me the clue I needed to focus this interpretation. When the Sun makes its move, it will be joined by the asteroid House, which is a direct reference to domestic experiences; Hekate, which is feminine wisdom; and Venus (in her role as the female avatar, in Aquarius).

Feminine energy requires careful handling. It is not inherently rational; Venus in Aquarius is saying that in any form you express it, your feminine energy needs a framework within which to operate.

Beyond Your Beliefs

One of the things you are doing in this process is getting your personal belief structure beyond the feel-good level. In fact, you may notice beliefs you’ve carried your whole life crumbling like salt. Remember David Bowie’s suggestion: Don’t deceive with belief; which means, don’t deceive yourself, in particular, with things you believe about yourself.

There is a strong suggestion that you make up your mind about what you know to be true, rather than staying in deliberative mode. At the least, there is the encouragement to drop what you long ago determined were false, dysfunctional or incomplete aspects of your ‘spiritual’ concept system; and to pay attention when you find new ones. Most spiritual and religious systems are based on denial. Denial is precisely the thing that every single aspect of your astrology is suggesting has long outdone its use.

The Shadow Actually Knows

We are familiar with Pluto in Capricorn in your 12th house, a long-term transit. This is mirrored in Mars in Leo in the 7th house. Mars has a connection to Capricorn, and showing up for a relatively rare all-Leo retrograde, you are getting a dramatic representation.

An attribute of the 12th house, or a retrograde planet, is the confrontation of shadow material. Shadow material is anything that we deny, but which still maintains a presence. It’s all the disowned qualities of who we are, including the fears we don’t process, but pretend don’t exist. Plenty of shadow, in our culture, exists in sexual thoughts and feelings; in the current revision of the world, most sex is either projection, shadow or denial. The 12th house and Pluto both have potent erotic overtones, though of the kind that make us both question and get in touch with the deepest layers of existence that we can reach.

While the wise regard shadow material as creative fuel or as latent potential, it is often dealt with by projection. Imagine a male-female couple is together in a monogamous, heterosexual relationship. The woman is aware that her male partner has some unacknowledged homosexual feelings or past experiences, which for many reasons he feels he must deny, or throw a veil over. He doesn’t even talk about them with her. But she knows there is something going on under the surface of his personality and sexual reality.

She, in turn, has some homosexual feelings, which she does not openly address. She might admit them (it’s safer for women to admit some bisexuality than it is for men), though they are never particularly close to the surface and when she goes there, they arrive with ‘mild’ discomfort and a bit of intrigue. Mostly she is concerned about her partner’s bisexual tendencies. In both situations, their bisexuality is shadow material because it’s taboo and not openly acknowledged.

This human equation gives a sample of how shadow is turned into projection. Her questions about herself show up in the form of her questions about him. It’s not that her questions about him aren’t true or valid; it’s that they also mirror something inside her, which she can detach from if she only considers it in the context of his life. The implication is that for the time being — at least the first half of the year — one of the easiest places you can find your shadow material is in your opinions of other people. I say this recognizing how annoying it is, but also how useful. Keep your eye on the Eight of Cups tarot card: the one that says take the matter inward.

Meanwhile, one of the tests of a healthy relationship for you is whether you can be open about your shadow material there, and whether the material of the other person is considered open for discussion. Relationships that are structured based on mutual denial are likely to break down and experience many other communication gaps that could be addressed by opening those particular doors, assuming the relationship permits this. Yet it may not, and it would be quite counterproductive for you to set the limits of your own life on a situation that is itself limited.

I have a psychologist friend who I sent the draft of this reading to, and asked her if she wanted to share her thoughts. Here is what she said:

“I love conceptualizing the shadow as that which is latent, unmanifest, and in some way feeding or grounding that which we more easily perceive. I’m also very attracted to the idea that the shadow (or the unconscious or the black sun) be met “on its own terms,” or as primary in itself. It has been more useful to me to allow my experiences of darkness to be — and whereas shining a light there, bringing something into consciousness has its (significant) place, there is also, often, a tendency for that light to be an analytical one, which risks destroying or taking apart the darkness/shadow in the process. Marlan’s premise is that this darkness can be illuminated from within — no light (rationality?) needed, perhaps.

“Working clinically, I like to invite clients to ‘define’ shadow for themselves.

“Pluto in Cap in the 12th evokes for me a sense of entering the blackness, the shadow, the shit without expectation of what will be found, needing to trust the authority of the darkness and to possibly learn something about one’s own inner authority, limitations, freedom as a result.”

A Few Additional Notes on Mars Retrograde

By now, you can identify the scenarios associated with Mars retrograde in your opposite sign. While this story has a long history, it’s coming to a crux now. And the truly interesting thing here is that while what someone is going through on one level has nothing to do with you, there is some kind of mirror of your secret world being dramatized in front of you. You may be the only one aware of the scenario; for a variety of reasons, your personal investment or involvement is easy enough to hide, but not from yourself.

As this process unfolds, you may constantly be dancing with the question of when to reveal your deeper truth, or when you call a partner on a deeper truth that he or she may be avoiding, and which is influencing your relationship mainly by creating distance. While it’s necessary for the winds of individuality to blow between people, social relationships are, in theory anyway, based on sharing what we have in common. This simple fact is often lost, particularly in a time when we emphasize faux individuality to the degree where we seem to have nothing in common. And as in the current moment, the thing you have in common with someone may feel too deep or personal to talk about.

This may be true for a while, but you don’t want it to be true forever. You are under considerable psychic pressure to both uncover your deepest truth and also to be a more forthright person: to not live a life of secrets. This has been developing for a few years, though the issue is focusing right now. And I do mean right now. You are in possession of what I will call the Trump Card of Truth; you’re being granted amnesty on past issues of denial and withholding. These are related, though denial is what you keep from yourself, and withholding is what you keep from others (usually helped by denial).

You may fear significant consequences if you come forward with your truth, or if you hold someone to their truth. This may be true, but I suggest you consider the consequences if you choose to not proceed in a straightforward way. In a way that is typical of Chiron, the early effort results in the best results with the least damage and the greatest opportunity for healing. Once you’re put on notice, however, the probable consequences both increase and will have a tendency to expand into other areas of your life.

What I’m suggesting here is that while a lot seems at stake now, and while being authentically yourself and holding this out as a standard may seem risky, the problem is, at the moment, contained; and more than being a problem that is contained, it’s a concentrated, useful healing opportunity.

A Professional Connection

It seems like there may be a connection to a professional situation, whether past or present. One thing you can learn from this is how to avoid your tendency for professional situations to become tales of intrigue. Indeed, the situation you’re facing may indeed be a morph between personal and professional — the involvement of both Capricorn and Mars suggest this mix — where a variety of boundary issues are at stake.

One version of that boundary issue is: are you doing what you want in your professional expression of life, or are you doing what someone else wants? If you have one ‘career issue’ to sort out this year, this is THE one.

In truth, the one and only boundary is the truth: starting with what is true for you; which translates to, what you really want. The truth becomes a problem when there are issues of power involved, and there are — only now, you’re the one with the power (if you claim it). You seem determined to use this situation to your advantage, which is a good start. Your tendency to use a situation for the greatest good for all concerned is risky right now, since you need to know what you want, and get other people out of the way.

If you’re feeling isolated or misunderstood, you may not think you’re so powerful; and like with many things in your life, I suggest you go beyond appearances. I suggest that you keep this in mind as you work out a situation that will, if you handle it with clarity, do more to alleviate your sense of being alone than anything you’ve done in quite a while.

One thing to remember is that you cannot save anyone from himself or herself; but you can save you from yourself. While your situation is manifesting in the form of a relationship, it’s really about you. And due to the depth that you’re going with yourself, you may find yourself in a position where it’s difficult for others to understand you; where you know yourself better than they do. This contradicts the romantic ideal of ‘someone knowing you as well as you know yourself’, which is usually possible if neither partner knows themselves so well.

The Great Clarification: Chiron-Neptune Conjunction

The Aquarius astrology that has dominated most of my discussions and those of some other astrologers involves the conjunction now happening in Aquarius. This conjunction — which has involved four planets (Jupiter, Chiron, Nessus and Neptune) has come down to a focal point of just two: Chiron and Neptune. This conjunction has been brewing for five years, and is a significant part of the world’s story right now: a struggle for clarity and awakening. We live in a world where nearly everything has been reduced to a drug; or at least to an addictive substance rather than a nourishing one.

Consciousness itself has been described as a drug: that is, a trance. Which is another way of saying that we are defining ourselves out of existence. Yet there is a trance-like quality that seems to dominate what we are doing to our minds, and one of the most useful places we can look for information about this is what has been going on in Aquarius. In many ways, Aquarius is the sign that makes us human. Its image is the gathering or measuring of water (depending on the era you look to).

With Jupiter out of the way, we now have a clear view of the Chiron-Neptune conjunction: which is happening in your sign; and that means that you are at the end of a very long growth process, and at the beginning of a whole new phase of your life.

Neptune in Aquarius is about the tendency of people to do whatever a group says they should be doing; Chiron in Aquarius is about the crisis for individuality that any self-conscious person has. The Aquarian struggle to define oneself in the context of a group, and to hold one’s individuality as part of a group, are exemplified by this transit. Now the two planets are meeting in a clear conjunction, which is pushing the issue.

Part of what you are clarifying is something about the power that you give to groups, of any kind, including your family. If you find yourself taking responsibility, or being handed responsibility, for what a group has done, be careful.

Practically Speaking, Money Matters

Let’s end with a discussion of money. I am going to be less analytical and more declarative here. Simply put, you have had a lot of ideas for how to make money the past however many years; but you have not had The Idea for how to establish yourself financially, nor have you had the motivation to create something. That idea is on its way. Will you recognize it when you see it? And will you take action? Plenty depends upon it, because this idea has the power to change your life, by providing a focus that you adopt and which helps you create your next dimension of existence.

I suggest you take three steps to prepare the way for this revelation.

The first step is to make sure you assess your doubts and misgivings about acquiring money. A great many people who aspire to do the right thing have a concept that money is dirty or wrong. Money is energy, neutral in itself. What you do with money is what matters. If you find yourself going through rationalizations here, check yourself.

The second step is to strive for independence. You have some odd boundaries about money, and there is a tendency to let other people become involved in ways that they really do not need to be involved; or rather, you do not need them. You do not need anyone’s approval. You don’t need advice: you need people you can consult, and there is a big difference between the two. Others have a lot of ideas about who and what you should have, in terms of your finances and contracts, and I suggest you keep them as far from your process as possible. When you do get involved, work with detailed contracts that lay out the relationship and the flow of funds.

The third step is to be prepared for something entirely different than what you are doing, or what you have envisioned in the past. Change means change. Progress means progress. You have come up against many dead ends, and you’re ready to go past them. Part of embracing progress may mean identifying something deep in the past that you envisioned and see if you and/or the world have suddenly caught up with your own idea.

Just like you’re doing with yourself.

Let’s start with leadership: the most important thing in the world; in our world, and the rarest thing to find. Rarer than a unicorn; rarer than a talking goat. As you are discovering, leadership is not about being the boss. It’s about setting the example; and if duty calls, it’s about taking up the mantle of responsibility. Faux leadership is about power; real leadership is the willingness to stand up. In our world right now, there is barely such a thing. To the extent that power exists, it must transform itself into example and responsibility; and the necessity to grow into these things.

Your solar charts are currently in the most magnificent setup for cultivating true leadership, a process that is happening for you from the inside out. But this is not for its own sake: there is an idea on the horizon, and it is that which you will use as the focal point of your life.

Meanwhile, you might be thinking: Man, the past year was not easy. Every other Capricorn I know said it was just the worst year in history. And what’s this, suddenly I’m up for a promotion?

Well, you always were. You know that.

Mainly because it’s so beautiful and illustrative, I would like to describe the astrology. The first element is Pluto in Capricorn. Pluto in one’s own sign is the very picture of growth; it can also come with self-obsession. Pluto has not been in Capricorn since the time of the American Revolution, so nobody alive remembers the last time around. In this sense you are a pioneer, being drawn into your awareness in a way that is entirely new for the human race.

Though there is quite the fireworks display going on in Capricorn at the moment, highlighted by Pluto newly arrived in your sign, and at the moment combined with eclipses, a recent Mercury retrograde, and your ruling planet, Saturn, involved in many of the most precipitous developments of 2010. It would be difficult to imagine a more appropriate symbol of cultivating integrity than Pluto in Capricorn. As you have no doubt seen, this transit is challenging, pushing you to open up in ways that you never have before; indeed, to admit your own existence to yourself as you are in this moment, as contrasted with Capricorn’s tendency to get lost in history.

Capricorn’s ‘ruling’ planet is Saturn, which has recently changed signs: for the next two years it will be moving through Libra, which is your 10th solar house; the house most often associated with your sign. The flavor is Libra: justice, beauty, and at least, the appearance of propriety. The 10th is the house of honor, reputation, leadership and responsibility.

With a strong 10th house (by natal, progressed or transit), one is called to a higher purpose; called to serve; and with so much as a modicum of ethics, one cannot get away with anything (so there is no point trying). While these transits bestow authority and to some extent power, they also provide a clear ethical structure that you have, by now, figured out it would be wise to remain within. Saturn arrived in Libra in the autumn of 2009 and will remain there until 2012 (after making a brief visit back to Virgo in 2010).

The watershed transit of Pluto in Capricorn is being anchored into reality, and into your reality, by the square aspect from Saturn. That is to say, the process that Pluto signifies is being grounded by actual tests, experiences, challenges and needs represented by the meeting with Saturn, which will help you establish a new way of life. Some of what you learn now you will refer to and consider for the rest of your days. That is how significant this era is; I suggest you treat the next few seasons as a precious, finite resource offering you unique opportunities to learn about yourself and the world.

A Clean Sweep and a New Mission

This is the image of a calling, a clean sweep, the sense of an urgent mission: but as Saturn squares Pluto, it, too, is being taken apart and being put back together, so the direction is not always perfectly clear; your goal is a moving target, though you need to get to the essence underneath the movement. It is fair to say that there is no aspect of your life that is not subject to renovation, recreation and restructuring. The result is a passionate drive toward personal renewal, and then as this process heats up and births itself, the energy is expressed by Saturn in the 10th house; which in turn pushes you to grow personally; which opens up not just your sense of mission but also molds your personality into the willingness to take on that karma.

It’s no accident if you feel like your integrity is being tested; in truth tests are how we build and acquire the stuff. The world is not designed to teach us to be whole people, who live in accord with our values. Rather, the world teaches us to compromise our values at nearly every turn, from eating what we know is not good for us to working jobs that we know are not good for the world. So I am not speaking about growth in the abstract here. You may decide in these very months that it’s time to do something completely different with your life.

You may clear enough debris out of the way to determine what that might be. See if you can tap into a discovery you are making about what is important to you. You have a LOT of astrology working on your side: helping you focus on values, on relationships, on how you think of yourself, how you structure your life and — as I will get into in the last section — a once-in-a-lifetime revelation about your emotional reality, your home life and family life: and by family, I mean not just your immediate relatives but the whole history of your family.

Yet remember that together, these transits illustrate the intersection of personal integrity and leadership by example. People you do not even know or have never heard of are aware of you and looking to you for a role model. No matter what we may say or think, humans learn behavior by modeling, not by theory. Consider the influence of this, over the decades and the generations.

I write this fully aware of how ethically feeble most humans are, how unwilling to stand up, or stand out, or take on the burden of responsibility. I am not here to admonish you about responsibility but rather to get you excited about such an amazing opportunity to both grow and serve the world.

One Person, of One Character

With astrology like this, there is no room for dividing your character: being this kind of person in this circumstance and that kind of person in that circumstance. Rather, you will both draw strength and energy from allowing different aspects of yourself to teach one another how to be, and from maintaining an inner dialog.

In particular, the emphasis is on integrating your actual self, be it personality or soul (however you think of it) with how you present yourself in the world, particularly the professional world. Beware of any equation in which you present yourself as one way at home, another way at work; beware of any situation where you seem to have “two personal lives.” This is a little like a potter working the clay so that there are no air bubbles trapped in the material before it goes into the kiln; bubbles cause the pot to explode.

The essence here is about existing as one unified individual; which is of course a profound challenge in this world, but it’s one that you’re up to. You have every individual component you need to make this real, including being intimately acquainted with your fears and your potential. Recent years of Pluto in Sagittarius took you, perhaps unwittingly or less-than-willingly, on a tour of all your worldly insecurities; you have been through a trial by fire which has, with any grace at all, left you with the awareness that your soul not only exists, but is fully intact. Pluto in Capricorn is the practical application of this learning.

As Malvin Artley has written of your sign that Capricorn “completes the person and endows a person with their higher qualities. It is this higher intelligence and our ability to blend it with the lives that make up our [instinctual] nature that make us uniquely human. If that higher intelligence is used to good ends it leads us to the heights of achievement. If otherwise, it can lead us to the depths of depravity.”

The high and the low: that is indeed Capricorn; the deciding factor is always integrity. Integrity is likely to involve working with the aspects of yourself that are not what you would call pure. But they are just as purely human as any other. Pluto is going to push up your sex drive. That is human; to live in integrity, be truthful about it. Pluto is making you conscious of your power; that is human; be honest and fair. The choice is not the high or the low; the choice is whether to walk a path of integration or a path of fragmentation.

While these transits of Saturn and Pluto surely give you a choice in the matter of which route to take, more is on the line in that choice than anyone has told you. You are being conferred with significant authority. This calls for a measure of impeccability.

The message from this configuration is to understand the danger of self-interest, in such a moment. While I am not here to argue against self-interest, I am here to say that with every decision you make, self-interest must be tempered and informed by community interest. Your world and the world must be seen for the ways they overlap, and your strongest point of action recognized as the common ground where the two meet.

Eclipses Across Cancer and Capricorn

This common ground is being emphasized by eclipses across your sign and your opposite sign, Cancer. These tend to be some of the most challenging personal events, because they push the limits of structure and our ability to handle the flow of events. They can seem to take us out of control of our own lives. You might want to start with the idea that we’re never really in control, but we can influence the flow of events.

All matters of growth are pushed and accelerated by eclipses. The solar eclipse that occurred in your sign on Jan. 15 has accelerated your sense of movement and growth; and has emphasized the fits and starts quality of your life: events, relationship developments and other growth necessities seem to show up all at once.

For the next year that eclipses involve your sign, I suggest you think in five-month frames of time, with the next one beginning in late June. Plenty happens between now and then, but June is the time when events begin to move rapidly and challenge your ability to handle them. I suggest you prepare for this carefully and make sure that you have full awareness of your commitments for early summer. I don’t suggest planning a vacation between mid-June and mid-July; stay where you have the most influence.

In personal relationships, I suggest that you keep the pressure low and make sure that you take every opportunity for communication, when it’s optional and not mandatory.

All of life exists in the context of relationships, and your involvements with other people are changing as fast as you are. Eclipses, however, can arrive with a distorted sense of reality. Feelings are exaggerated. The importance of events can be greatly exaggerated. Yet they are also the time when our emotional bills come due. Another function of eclipses is to equalize the pressure on both sides of any equation — in this case, to create more level working space between you and your close partners. Yet this must be done carefully, with awareness.

Self-Esteem and Resources: More News from Chiron

The 2nd house of astrology is where we look for all matters of self-esteem — and personal resources, such as money. They are related. Both are critical issues in the world today, and you have made a study of these things going back at least five years. At a certain point, you started to figure out that you had a fundamental misunderstanding with yourself about your value to the world. It’s not that you were selling yourself short; it was more like you were giving yourself away.

For you this house is Aquarius. The 2nd house tells us what our real wealth is, and where we may seek our wealth. Since you have Aquarius here, the implication is your resources come from group or collective endeavors; from ideas; and that they come with an inventive spirit.

In many ways the 1st house is a concept of who you are; the 2nd house is the endowment and expression of that concept. With Aquarius in this house, you have images in your solar chart of how your values are far more revolutionary than you usually let on. You present yourself outwardly as a conservative, that is, as someone who is personally conservative; but in truth you are something more akin to a progressive or futurist, and you have your radical leanings, particularly in recent years.

In my theory of astrology, we make our money by harmonizing with our 2nd house: and in your case that means being socially conscious, involved and connected.

Among the concrete focal points of integrity building or integration is weaving together the radical and conservative elements of your psyche. They make an excellent team. Both Capricorn and Aquarius are ruled by Saturn; Saturn’s transit across your 10th house of achievement is an expression of both you and your values, which are being integrated in a series of challenges in the world. You have a lot to gain by being out in the world, and by remembering that you live by your reputation. But — your reputation for what? I would say, at this point, your reputation for doing precisely and only what you truly believe in.

Jupiter in Aquarius the past four seasons helped you set some goals, and offered you a sense of your potential. You may be one of the few people you know whose financial potential is growing rather than shrinking, though more than being about ‘good fortune’ this has been about applying your honesty, intuition and foresight. It’s about not selling yourself short of your authentic values.

One of the reasons that you don’t struggle with self-esteem like so many people do is that you can relate to it as a concept; you can distance yourself from how you feel about yourself; you can apply logic; it’s easier for you not to get emotionally wrapped up in times when you’re struggling. Like everyone, you were subjected to being told lies about yourself, and you had an intellectual basis, even from a young age, for refuting those lies. You may have forgotten that you did so, and now is the time to remember the truth about who you are.

That said, Chiron and Neptune moving through this house the past five years (in the case of Chiron) and 10 years (in the case of Neptune) have put you through the paces, compelling you to question every value you hold or thought you held; to come to terms with your idea of how you feel about yourself — and with how you actually feel. You’ve experienced some of the drawbacks to thinking of yourself in the abstract, but those are easily remedied by getting real.

It’s likely that you have shifted from an intellectual orientation to a spiritual one; you’ve understood the power of crisis to raise awareness; you’ve determined, finally, that you really can change your values when you have to. There may have been a phase in the early 2000s when you made choices that to this day you don’t understand, including the choice for who to call a friend. Yet with the arrival of Chiron in the middle of the decade, you began to make a series of corrections.

In this process, which is still culminating, you have learned what may be your single most important life skill: how to blend your intuition and your intellect. You have learned that they don’t often conflict, if you apply both consciously. And, if you use them together, you get a total effect that is greater than the sum of the parts.

With Aquarius as your solar 2nd house, you have no doubt discovered that your friends and your community are your most important worldly resource. Yet for that to work, you must bake the strategy, and work the plan. Yet you know what happens when you differ with them ideologically and so it has become crucial to know who your friends are, and why they are your friends. At this point in your life, it’s vital that you attract people who stand on solid ground with themselves, because they are the ones who will help you stand on solid ground with yourself. Let’s look more closely at that now.

Mars Retrograde in Leo

One of the defining aspects of this year is Mars retrograde in Leo. While this transit technically ends on March 10, Mars will remain in Leo through much of the spring, and carry the flavor of Leo for the next two years.

Leo is your 8th solar house: the house of shared resources and common values. With this transit, your relationships and all agreements are being tested to come to a point of mutual interest and agreement, on certain specific points. This is not easy. Egos are involved; pride is on the line. Your tendency to avoid conflict through political means or diplomacy is being tested now, as someone in your life proves how stubborn they can be.

Yet this is compelling you to figure out what you want from the relationship, and by extension, what you want at all.

You tend to lean more in an egalitarian direction than the people you encounter. The place you can reach common ground is on the value of service. No matter how self-centered someone you are living/working/growing with may seem, I suggest you appeal to them on the level of service to begin the process of working from a common vantage point. I say this no matter how ridiculous of an idea it may seem, as regards certain people you know (such as those who seem totally caught up in themselves).

You can guide your relationships toward integrity by identifying the ways in which you and the people close to you can take responsibility for the world around you. Mars retrograde in your house of agreements, contracts and shared resources is calling you and the people around you to let go of individual interests and pursue common interests. You are very likely to be the one who recognizes these common interests first.

Mars has a significant relationship to Capricorn: it’s the exalted planet, and is therefore one of the symbols for you in any chart. We all know that Saturn alone doesn’t really explain Capricorn all the way: not for anyone who’s ever met a goat, that is. Your interests are deeply invested in those of someone else, and the feeling may be that this is intractable. You may in some ways feel like you’re the prisoner of a contract or a relationship agreement that is holding you back. Now is the time to unravel this situation.

In addition to representing what you share with others and what they share with you, the 8th also represents your secrets. That is to say, what you don’t share. If you’re paying attention lately, you’ve been discovering or digging up all kinds of previously hidden information about yourself. You may be noticing what you keep from others. You will learn a lot from making a map of these secrets.

This digging process has shifted to your commitments: marriage, business partnerships and contractual arrangements of any kind. For as ambitious as you can be, you also tend to compromise too easily. I won’t go as far as saying that you have a tendency to sell out to the desires and needs of others, but you do let your own goals get dissolved into the seemingly larger goals of anything you’re part of. In some ways this helps your leadership position: nobody can accuse you of not playing for the whole team.

A Political Metaphor

However, you seem to finally be coming around to the idea that it’s time to recover yourself, your identity and your personal goals from any contractual situation you’re involved in. This is part of a larger calling to take leadership, which begins with leadership in your own life.

Perhaps a political metaphor will work. Imagine that last year you ran for office and got elected. In order to get elected, you had to take campaign contributions and make some deals; not merely promises, but some actual deals behind the scenes. At the same time, the election process was an experience of total personal transformation. Along the way to taking responsibility, you had to reinvent yourself; you think of yourself as a very different person than you were even a year or two ago.

Now that you’ve been elected and have taken office, you have some authority and the responsibility for your actions — and the people with whom you made your deals want their payback. This puts you in a delicate situation, because you know you made some agreements that in hindsight you didn’t want to make; you compromised certain core values. And you have to figure out how to handle this.

What’s going to get you to a better place is the ability to guide people to honor the greater good. In order to do this, you need to be deeply centered in yourself. You need to minimize the risk of being taken off-center. Recovering lost or compromised integrity presents special challenges, because the people you’re involved with may not, indeed, are unlikely to have the same agenda.

You tend to be a person of honor: you want your word to count. You’re also a person who is, on a daily basis, being reminded about your participation in the greater good. Now your job is to do sufficient soul searching that you understand what motivates people, and speak to them in their own language — about what is good for everyone. What I suggest you do first is make sure you understand what you committed to, what is actually expected of you, and finally, where the individuals with whom you are involved actually stand. Their needs have changed over time, their expectations have changed, and thankfully, so too has their situation.

The Revelation: Liberation and Reflection

I have written many times that Capricorns make the best revolutionaries. This may seem odd, given the tendency to think of Capricorn as the sign of the past. It’s been said that those who do not know history are destined to repeat it. Think of revolution as the experience of not repeating the past. You have the ability to go forward like few others. For all that I have said about growth and progress and new goals, there is one point of 2010′s astrology that amplifies this to a rather large scale. This astrology is so astonishing and so unique to you that, truthfully, I am at a loss for how to characterize it. So I’ve called my astrology mentor, David Arner, and with the help of his Capricorn Moon, we’ve worked out a few ideas.

The event is the conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus on the Aries Point, which I would rate as the most significant aspect of the year. This is the cusp of your 4th house: your grounding and roots. As I have described in other sections, Jupiter-Uranus in Aries is astrology that shakes the world. And it is very close to home for you, located in your house of home and security; it affects you on the gut level, and has the opportunity to take you far from anything familiar; and in the process, deep into your core self. Many other aspects say the same thing; none with quite the intensity and creative potential of this one.

The upshot is that the changes that are developing in many aspects of your life, and have for a long time, suddenly seem to condense and manifest all at once, shaking the foundations you are standing on. The image is of some experience that seems to have the world collapse under your feet and simultaneously open up a vast new horizon for you. Whatever develops happens so fast that you don’t have time to think about it. Yet you do have time: now, which is to say — consider what you would do with a kind of wildcard opportunity. Consider what you would do if all your trappings and attachments did not hold you back. Consider what you would do if you could really be yourself, in the present.

Between now and then you are likely to have many ideas — most of which you don’t trust. I suggest you trust them, because the opportunity to manifest at least some of them will indeed happen. So if you find yourself in flights of fancy during the first few months of the year, especially about what you want to do or where you want to be, know that the stars are guiding you in some radical new direction.

Your motto for this time could be, “If I only knew now what I will know then.” You know more than you think. The story told by this astrology suggests that you will have plenty of time to reflect; plenty of time to maximize the results and effects of the change, a process lasting well into 2011. Insights will come; now is the time to vision, and for action.

Where we find you at the beginning of a new decade is in that delicate place of transposing potential into manifestation. You could say that is always true, but there are times when we have to get the idea out of our heads and onto the ground, and this is one of them. Every cell in your body is reminding you that your life is now about making it real; getting real. You have had so many visions of how your life can be the past year, and your mind has been racing.

True, it’s been racing in a number of directions. You have not exactly been the one-pointed arrow of intention that your sign represents; you have, so far as I can see, been in an unusual mode of crisis for a while that has only recently begun to ease off. Still, there is some tension in your heart and soul; some sense of having lost your way. This is a very meaningful state of being mixed up or disoriented: much more meaningful than feeling confident, because what you learn from your space of not knowing and not feeling your direction will tell you everything you need to know to find that direction.

Over the past year, you’ve had several unusual tastes of how good your life can be, and how difficult, and how extreme; and you’ve got a sense of the fragile path we tread on the planet. You have discovered how much hinges on this ineffable thing we call faith, particularly in yourself. I would guess that despite your usual persona of someone who is visiting from another planet, you are finding reasons to feel like you’re actually at home on this one. Interesting that Sagittarius is ruled by the Earth in the method outlined in Alice Bailey’s Esoteric Astrology.

Pluto, from Sagittarius to Capricorn

Pluto, the lord of evolution and transformation, spent over a decade in your sign, making its final exit early in 2009. Many of you have reported what it was like to have Lord Shiva come through your life like the F Train. So let’s take a few moments and review your first year with Pluto out of your sign.

Even though astrologers are beginning to think of Pluto as a regenerative soul force rather than a destructive one, the truth is that Pluto transits often draw people into the deepest, darkest depths of themselves. Pluto was in Sagittarius so long you likely forgot what it was like to have it anywhere else, though if you consider some of what you went through in the late 80s and early 90s you will have a clue. Pluto in your sign pushed you to change, to become and most of all to envision your life; you may have had to find a new vision every day.

At times, you clashed with others and at other times you felt compelled to make open war. I would guess that while you benefited from Pluto’s presence and while you must surely miss it in some ways, you would not want to repeat the past decade for anything. The thing to remember is that the experience changed you, and you will not change back. I believe that when outer planets come through our lives, we pass through a gateway. We are different, and the energy of the sign itself is activated; the world has become a rather Sagittarian place in the past decade: full of ideology, global theories and awareness and lots of fundamentalist bluster.

I trust you’ve learned to temper yourself as this process has gone on; to practice the restraint that gives you credibility.

Now Pluto is in Capricorn, which is pushing you in a new direction: self-sufficiency. I am inclined to say radical self-sufficiency, but by radical, I mean getting down to your roots. Part of this is going beyond your dependency on structure. For your freewheeling tendencies, you are someone who understands the benefits of leaning on a system. Now, you are taking the step of becoming the system you need to lean on; this is not the time for you to trust externals. And assuming you plan on keeping your money in the bank and not in your mattress, you need to know exactly what bank it’s in.

More to the point, your efforts at financial independence need to be coordinated with actual improvements in your life. Money in itself is merely energy or potential; what we do with it, and how we apply it, are what matters.

Close up on Financial Independence

Nobody would believe you suffer from a lack of self-esteem, but your astrology says you’re working out some deep issues of self-worth. I think that if astrology were to serve humanity to the greatest extent possible, it would devote itself to one issue: helping people heal and even discover their self-esteem. Self-esteem ties together how we feel about being alive, our sense of commitment, what we think we have to work with and what we actually have to work with.

Nearly everyone starts with a disadvantage here; we come from a society that encourages us to evade responsibility, deny real participation and never actually grow up. You have an advantage: you were born with a seemingly mature set of values. The problem, as referenced in the section above, involves what those values are about; and in reality they are getting old — but the good news there is that they are all up for renovation. So, too, is your concept of self-respect. And this ties directly into your quest not just for money but your obsession with being financially independent.

Let’s draw a direct parallel: self-esteem is financial independence.

Let’s identify the problem: in a word, guilt. I recognize that I am probably the first astrologer to suggest that, categorically enough to say here, there is a guilt issue inherent in Sagittarius, but we find it in Capricorn in the 2nd house. Guilt is the shadow side of Capricorn, and you can be sure that a good few of the Sagittarians that you’ve heard from who have made their way in the world have done so specifically by overcoming this issue.

Now the major transits are catching up with this issue, in the form of Pluto making its long, long trek across your 2nd solar house, Capricorn. I suggest that as part of this process you make a conscious effort to replace guilt with ethics. Guilt is insidious. It takes a thousand forms and wears a million disguises. It may be the single most serious problem faced by, or implanted in, human consciousness. It is the cause and core of nearly all insanity; it replaces love in relationships; and if not addressed, it stalks us even unto the grave. I am not sure you’ve identified this issue and if you have, and if you’ve addressed it, you can comment better than anyone on how important it is to sanity.

Looking at the Patterns

Lately, you’re getting a taste of why so few people try to exceed what seems to be their lot in life: the moment you aspire to anything new, it seems you meet some kind of resistance.

New is novel and exciting, but new does not stay new for long, and the universe is made of dependable patterns. In reading those patterns, I want to suggest some priorities and considerations, beginning with something not to worry about: you are safe. That is a bold statement to make on a planet that is rife with anxiety, with authentic concern and with this strange thing called terror, which has been adopted into a full-on religion: terrorism, which we cannot live through one day without hearing about at least 100 times.

Alas, I am here to tell you that you can relax. You have set your life in the right direction; you have endured many enforced changes; you have been pushed to grow and to grow up so many times that you’ve adopted this as a dependable method when challenges beckon. You’ve learned not to be scared of your own shadow, and you’ve made some critical decisions that have oriented you on a path of self-sufficiency. Most vital to a Sagittarius, you have noticed that you really do have good ideas. I will devote a whole section to this in a little while: your path to financial self-sufficiency, and your good ideas, are one concept. That you have the capacity to be a free thinker and to be economically free are the same thing.

But this is not exactly why I’m saying you’re safe; my reasoning is astrological in nature — Jupiter making its way across Pisces, your 4th solar house, bestows protection and freedom, and is here to remind you that you have room to grow; you have room to expand. I suggest that if you want to cultivate this feeling of security and potential, keep a primary focus on your home. Establish your home as your base of personal and business operations. I suggest you do this as a conscious act, making modest investments in both functionality and comfort. In recent years you have felt anything but stable; and now is the time to experiment with some grounding.

How to Economize

I recognize that there are many pressures in your life to economize. Take them seriously, but not too seriously. The thing to cut out is waste, rather than practicality, function or a bit of necessary indulgence. There is always plenty of waste to go around. Start with getting rid of that first.

Though you would be the last person most astrologers would remind of this, remember the necessity for excess in human existence. Bacchus, the god of grapes and wine, was one of the most revered deities of Roman antiquity (successor to Dionysus, who was even more revered). Bacchus pushed the lines of gender, of sanity and of reason, and it’s necessary to make sure you do these things at regular intervals. I remind you now because your tendency of late is to play your cards close to the vest, to honor your limitations and to be oddly cautious; you may wonder what has come over you. It’s always good to be aware of the existence of boundaries and limits; and it’s necessary to push them as well.

The point of the protection you’re being offered is not for you to ease back and do nothing: it’s to give you a platform to work from to accomplish some of what you have determined is possible or at least what you want. This is protection on the move: functional safety. One way to look at it is as an airbag: it’s working when you’re not aware of it, but it’s useless when the car is sitting in the driveway. Therefore, this is the kind of protection that is saying: get out and drive around.

While you have significant influences calling on you to pull back, the real direction of your life is toward some kind of creative explosion wherein you explore the intersection between who you are and what you express. Expression, creation and identity are about to reveal themselves as one entity, and that entity is you. Daring, yes: it’s about the biggest chance that a person can take, and it helps to do so with some confidence; even if that confidence is designed to help you feel safe enough to take the first step.

Close Approaches, Small Causes, Big Effects

Your charts this year remind me a little of visiting Amsterdam. I’ve already mentioned the need for inviting Bacchus into your life, but it’s the near-miss quality of Amsterdam that I love the most. On a single day in that city you might ‘almost’ get run over by a bicycle or tram five times, but it doesn’t happen. You don’t want to push this one too far — each near miss would make a good reminder to pay that much more attention. Neither do you need to worry too much about brushes with success that qualify as near-miss events. Let them go by and see them for what they are.

The near-miss property is working independently of various other things going on for you. It’s kind of a sideshow, with its own particular entertainment and metaphysical value. It’s here to remind you that you’re on the edge: in every way. Allow that sense of being on the edge to be your constant companion. Remember how many positive developments have happened to you at other times when you lived a bit dangerously. I’m kind of laughing that I’m saying this to you, but certain distinct elements in your chart say you’ve been a bit meticulous and overcautious lately, but that is just one aspect of your charts.

Indeed, many aspects of your life are guiding you toward taking a chance that you may not be aware exists yet. As I read the charts, this is a creative chance of some kind; yet one that requires you to redefine yourself in the process of exploring it. I am suggesting here that the subtle ways you redefine and rethink your identity are consistent with developing a new creative pattern, therefore having new ideas; and that at a certain point in the middle of the year, you take a chance on the whole thing: you, the idea and something in a relationship; this looks like a relationship with several people: perhaps a group endeavor that you instigate.

Meanwhile, you’re on another kind of edge: understanding the influence that you have in the world. The place to start this conversation is to admit that you do have an influence at all; the question is, which, and how.

While you’re watching the near misses go by, I suggest you pay attention to the ways that your decisions influence the world around you. In order to do this, you will need to be extra observant, and apply a bit of theory. You of all people do not exist in a vacuum: that is to say, it seems like everything you do and think is part of a community process. This works in overt ways and covert ways. Overtly, you are considered by others to be a leader. Covertly, the thoughts you think subtly influence a great many other people around you.

What I will call the ‘influence effect’ is subtle, though I suggest you be observant at two kinds of moments: when you feel you don’t have any influence at all; and when you feel curious. These moments — if you can step out of them and see them clearly — are the ones where you will discover where your true power resides.

The One Mistake You Can Stop Making

Is there an error you’re making again and again? I don’t see exactly what it is — but I have a description. It involves what you know, but forget that you know, about yourself. Mixed in may be the fear, or the sense, that other people know something about you that would change their opinion about you; which you assume that they know, whether this is true or not; and then a series of judgments that you assume others have, which may or may not be true.

You are not as transparent as you think. Yet parallel to that fact is another: you can afford to be more transparent, and doing so would ease a kind of psychic tension that you tend to carry around with you. This is a big weight, carried by most of the human race. Most of this involves what is going to be known about our sexual reality.

I suggest you take comfort in the fact that eventually, everything about you will be known; that ultimately, there are no secrets, and therefore, you have no reason to invest energy in the attempt to hide anything from the world. It’s not just that the attempt to hide takes energy; rather, it’s that it creates an interference pattern around you. It’s like a distraction or veil that hides who you are in those moments when what you want is to be sending the signal that you are an authentic person. Understanding something about the Sagittarian nature, you may be deliberately attempting to cloak yourself as a way to give yourself space: you do need space. But this really isn’t space; it’s like the illusion thereof.

This calls attention to one fact, which is that you need to take your space. We can add this to the list of attributes of Jupiter passing through your 4th solar house of home and security. Taking your space is about creating physical space for your existence; improving that space; but more to the point, creating a mental environment spacious enough for your ideas and your beliefs, and the major renovation they are undergoing.

Mars Retrograde: The Quest for What You Believe

Most spiritual methods teach us to transform sexual desire into some kind of spiritual idea or quest. Most people go along with this, without questioning it. We want to be pure and see ourselves as pure people; while at the same time, really addressing sexuality is a confrontation.

I would suggest that in your current quest for identity and by extension, what you believe, that you proceed in the other direction. Claim back every form of sex that you have projected onto some kind of spiritual quest or goal. This will save you a lot of confusion. Currently your charts suggest that you are experiencing quite a bit of confusion about who you are and what you believe, which you have confused with something ‘spiritual’ when its proper category is really ‘sexual’.

In our society we make a big deal about whether someone is gay or straight, and that supposedly ends the conversation of sexual identity. I dare say it goes a lot further than this, since most people are neither straight nor gay, and many have relational and erotic tendencies they tend to paper over with normative ideas. This is not your nature, but a lot of free people do or believe things that are not in their nature, for a while.

The way to pursue your sexual reality is through curiosity. As far as I can tell, that is the original sexual thought form. However, curiosity is usually supplanted by guilt. The opposite of guilt is not innocence; it is curiosity. Your curiosity about yourself, your purpose in life and the ideas by which you live is burning in you right now, but it may be lurking right below awareness. Or some doubt has come to the surface, and you’re trying to chase it down.

You are not in pursuit of ‘an idea about yourself’, you are seeking an actual experience of yourself. You don’t need plans, you need a vision for who you want to be in the world. The issue actually involves your mental horizon: that is, what you’re able to see in your inner landscape, and how this defines your conception of existence.

From Sex to Religion and Back

One way to explore this horizon involves your relationship to your emotions. This of course is intimately related to your sexuality, since in the total universe of feelings, I would say that at least half of them qualify as involving your sexuality and sexual identity — particularly at this stage of your life.

Most of how the human race deals with this is through religion and its modern clone, spirituality. This is like the lagoon where most humans are trained to dump their erotic feelings, or try to. This does not work for you. The reason is simple: it does not leave enough room for an individual to make decisions and live the life they choose. This, if I am not mistaken, is your one and only goal. Most people view religion as a ‘part of their life’ rather than the actual foundation of their life. Your view is that your whole experience of life is your journey, spiritual or otherwise, and that it must make room for the totality of who you are. There’s no room to pretend that you’re not working under the same basic concepts all the time.

The thing is, you seem to have run into a limit. If this were my astrology, I imagine it would feel like a struggle over my philosophy of life, which on a deeper level is about questioning my faith in myself. I might be struggling to project my ‘self’ into the future; you might say, looking for the story arc of my life. In honor of this question, I have three queries for you.

The first is, what was the religion of your father and his father? When you’re done with this investigation, you can check into your mom’s family’s religious history in pursuit of the same question, though it shows up first in the astrology as coming from your father’s side of the family. Most of us who are not beholden to religion make the mistake of thinking it had no influence on us. I would suggest we suspend this belief for now, and look directly into what your dad’s family believed. It might be useful to go back to your great-grandfather, so get ready to do a little investigative reporting.

I can give you a clue: you’re searching for the influence of patriarchy. We don’t give this a name lately, but patriarchy is the rulership of the world, and the world of ideas, by men. By definition it is not friendly to women. Not friendly to women means not friendly to sex (and vice versa). Once you have a fresh understanding of the religious concepts used by your family, you will have a much better understanding of how you can stretch your mental horizon as wide as you need to.

Another query involves how you feel about your creative process. Cutting to the chase, do you consider art dangerous? I’m not kidding. Art is dangerous, because it compels us to change, whether we create it or are subject to it. By its nature, art requires a kind of freedom that you ‘believe in’ but which you may not always grant yourself enough of. The reasons for this will come back to the religion question we started this section with, and those in turn relate to sex and the controversy over sexual desire: but there is a dimension of art involved; that is, a dimension of creative process. What both have in common are the constant challenge to the psychological and aesthetic status quo.

The values of one invested in creative process are different than those who live the life of a consumer or cog in the machine. Creative process involves constant change, and it involves indulging one’s fertility in relationship to the world. I could sum this up as, what risks are you willing to take, and what risks are you not willing to take, and why? The most meaningful of those involves your relationship to the unknown; and involves the way your outlook about sex influences your outlook on the world.

Maybe the astrology will offer you an image you can use. Mars is retrograde in your 9th solar house, that of your outlook on life, your long-term plans and your mental horizon. Mars represents your 5th solar house (Aries, which for you is about creative love, sexual experimentation and taking risks) and your 12th solar house (Scorpio), which is a picture of how your sex drive defines who you are — whether you like it or not; whether you resist that fact or not.

Which brings us back to the influence of religion in your life. Or is it sex? Or is it creativity? To put it simply, you would be a lot more liberated if you weren’t getting hung up in someone else’s concept of morality. Indeed, you have some prudish tendencies that don’t really fit who you are; and which have been coming under scrutiny in recent years. Outwardly you’re an extremely liberal person, but inwardly you tend to get caught up in the same moralism and control that lead to huge scandals that distract our attention from the real issues. The place to find and unhook that moralism is the past: as in past generations and understanding what information was handed down to you in the form of rules, limits and the feeling that you need to hide who you are — all of which is running in the background of your psyche.

The 2012 Dynamic and You

Mars retrograde is mandating a deep personal reassessment. It’s not an outer planet transit, but the setup is so rare that it counts for one. However, you are under a diversity of transits by slow-moving planets that actually form one configuration.

I am calling this the 2012 dynamic, as it’s phase one of the full-on 2012 alignment; which in some ways is more impressive than what we get in 2012 itself. Therefore it’s something happening now, and it involves four planets at the moment: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Pluto. In 2010 these planets team up and influence your chart in profound ways. I have been covering them as individual transits, and I would like to take a shot at looking at them as one setup, because they are all connected. Here are the houses involved, in order of house:

Pluto in Capricorn is in your 2nd solar house (resources and self-esteem). This is pushing you to deeper independence and self-awareness, deeply influencing you to stick to your values.

Jupiter conjunct Uranus in Aries will occur in your 5th solar house (creativity, risk-taking, art). This is a high-energy conjunction that is going to rock your world and in truth light up your potential like few things ever have. Both of these planets spend time in your 4th solar house as well.

Saturn in Libra is in your 11th solar house (hopes and dreams, community associations, income from work, public image). Saturn in your 11th house is also about finding your niche in life, and in business; your special place in the world. Saturn will still spend some time in Virgo, your 10th solar house, as well.

Imagine the changes of all three of these houses working together. Imagine the gods of change influencing your life in all these ways at the same time, as one process. I’ve meditated on this for a while and the words that come to mind are: a whole new gig.

Let me sum up your 2010 reading this way: The times we are living in call for a sense of adventure, if anyone alive is to have any fun. You possess precisely that sense of quest, and the wits to make the very most out of challenges that would easily derail the dreams of others. This is the moment you are living for. Live it well.