From Piscean Waters to Aries Fire

When planets change signs there is a profound shift in expression of the principles and values they symbolize. Saturn and Neptune have both been in Pisces—Neptune since 2012 and Saturn since 2023. We are now on the cusp of both entering Aries—Neptune on January 26 and Saturn on February 14. [1]

Both these celestial movements point to the beginning of a new era colored by the fiery consciousness of Aries. While Saturn’s transit through Aries will be for a little over 2 years, Neptune will be in Aries for roughly 13 years (see date chart below)—so we are entering a period wherein Aries themes, and the Aries styles of perception and behavior will be prominent.

In order to explore the openings and challenges of these signatures I want to look at the Greco-Roman goddess Athena. In the zodiac of the Dodeka Theoi, Athena is the Olympian god who rules Aries. Personifying aspects of the archetypal pattern of consciousness symbolized by Aries and its polarity partner Libra, a greater awareness of Athena, and the style of consciousness she personifies, can aid us in consciously navigating some of the opportunities and challenges of this fiery celestial chapter.

But in order to look ahead with a keener sight, we have to look at where we have been.

Neptune in Pisces

Neptune ingressed fully into Pisces in 2012 and its 14 year transit through the sign of the fishes comes to end this month.

As an archetypal principle, Neptune symbolizes the vast ocean of consciousness that all living beings are connected to. It dissolves whatever boundaries that separate us from participating in the All. Its processes of dissolution also works wonders on concrete reality, opening it up to other dimensions.

Archetypal principles have both light and shadow sides. Given the difficult current collective atmosphere, we can look back at this period (2012-2025) and see how Neptune’s undoing of concrete reality can also open the door to darker dimensions of the psyche. The last 14 years correlates with the dissolution of facts and truth in the collective sphere, a process fueled by the capacity of social media channels to proliferate disinformation and misinformation, like tidal waves continually crashing on the shores that erode the ground of reality, facts and truth.

Deception is another of the shadow dimensions of Neptune which has been amplified on the political stage to a mindbending, and to use the word of the decade, unprecedented degree.

The distortive power of the online world correlates to Neptune having been in a sextile to Uranus in Taurus, pointing to the technological sphere and its Promethean drive towards progress. Consider the decision by social media tycoons like Zuckerberg to cease monitoring their platforms for lies and misinformation, in essence, opening the floodgates to the forces who are bent on distorting reality in service to their real aims of accruing  greater wealth and political power.

Under Neptune in Pisces we have all been drawn into grappling with existential questions about reality and truth, the powerful ways people can be manipulated by the spinning of fantasies that stir the darker reaches of the psyche and its survival fears and shadow projections. There is also the toll that the virtual world has had on the minds and inner emotional lives of people of all ages. The virtual world, which is boundaryless and suffuses nearly every corner of human life, has changed the actual world.

While depth psychological thinkers are trained to keep our eyes on the shadow, on the life affirming side we can catch a glimpse of Neptune in Pisces in the resurgence of interest in astrology and tarot, arts of the symbolic imagination that are ancient pathways to discovering one’s connection to the divine, mystery of life, the archetypal realm.

Saturn in Pisces

Saturn has been in Pisces since early 2023 through to February 2026. If among the many things Saturn symbolizes is the principle of reality, then we can see just how far into the Piscean waters we have drifted. This has been a time of unknowns, where instability and unpredictability abounds—environmental, economic, geopolitical, and sociopolitical. It’s as if we have been cast out upon a wild sea, open and vulnerable to the power of the deep, riding its waves and thrown about by its storms. A poem that captures the sense of danger and uncertainty:

 “The Wind Has Died”

My little boat,

Take care,

There is no

Land in sight.

—Charles Simic

Saturn moving through the boundary dissolving realm of Pisces points to a complex tension. Saturn is the planetary archetype of form and stability, it symbolizes the inner and outer structures of our lives which comprise our sense of identity. On the one hand the old dominant structures of our lives and identity have been called to soften and be released (Pisces) so to open to new possibilities (Aries). But that is very challenging. Change as we well know is hard and we need to be anchored in the ground of our reality and identity in order to feel safe, this is Saturn.

In the US over the last 10 years we have come to see that the voices of authority and representatives of our democratic tradition, which partly belong under the banner of Saturn, have conspired with the most challenging sides of Neptune to spin illusions into the fabric of our cultural and political narratives. Whether it is conscious strategy, dissociation, or moral bankruptcy, the abdication of responsibility that we have seen by many likewise reflects the problematic side of Saturn in Pisces. The sense of boundaries are gone and hungry Saturn hoards, feeds, gathers power for its own sake.

At the same time, Saturn in Pisces also points to the kind of vessel that might endure the turbulent spirit of the times and our passage into the new Aries atmosphere. I wrote about this when Saturn entered Pisces in early 2023, and want to share one imaginal craft which I think are still very much the work of the current time, especially since Saturn and Neptune (ruler of Pisces) will be conjunct into February 2027. Here an excerpt from that essay.

Vessels can be Saturnian in so far as by containing, they provide form and stability.  Saturn in Pisces also offers psychic medicine for the fluidity, uncertainty and instability that has bounded us on all sides in this Piscean era.

One medicinal capsule from the wise teacher Saturn is this— Adhering to psychological faith that there is something forming despite a difficult birth. Though ambiguous, there is something of value emerging. Psychological faith has to do with a strengthening of the personality, a greater capacity to live with uncertainty. It means developing “negative capability.”

This idea comes the Romantic poet John Keats. He defined negative capability as a skillfulness for “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”[2] It’s a way that finds value in not possessing knowledge, not being driven to work things out, not striving via reason towards knowing. Rather, a receptive, contemplative and attentive attitude towards what is unfolding and a “Willingness to let what is mysterious or doubtful remain just that” is what prevails. In other words, negative capability is related to a knowing more with the heart rather than with the reason-thinking mind.

Negative capability goes hand in hand with psychological faith because the negative knowing or embrace of uncertainty happening at our conscious ego level allows for confidence in the greater scheme of things taking shape in more unconscious ways. This sense of the larger intelligence at work in our lives is what the astro-cosmological perspective attempts to offer.

The loosening of certainties that Saturn and Neptune in Pisces correlates to in our individual and collective lives is the very condition and process which allows for something new to be born. The transparent movement of things is what allows something fresh to happen. This is what Saturn and Neptune’s passage out of Pisces into Aries symbolizes. It is from the vast, seemingly chaotic, formlessness and uncertain deep waters that life, and a sense of its bright direction, slowly emerges.

Aries - Athena and the Hero Warrior

So let us now turn to what is arising—Neptune in Aries. The last time Neptune entered Aries was in 1861 which correlated with large collective events that focused on issues of autonomy, freedom and conquest. In America this was the Civil War era (1861-1865), and the central conflict that lead to the war was a dispute about slavery between the northern states of the Union and the southern states of the Confederacy. The Confederate states wanted slavery to be enshrined and expanded to other states while the Union states wanted to end slavery throughout the US. In President Abraham Lincoln’s words, "This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it."[3] And in 1863 Pres. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation which freed all enslaved people in the Southern Confederate States.

Not looking to history to repeat itself literally, the Aries principles of freedom versus servitude, individualism and autonomy versus collectivity, are likely to emerge to the foreground in our collective and individual lives.

Neptune in Aries symbolizes a collective stirring of the heroic drive towards conquest and freedom.  The figures that embody these Aries values include the warrior, the crusader, the hero - figures who are the chosen favorites of the goddess Athena.[2]

The scene depicted in the Atlas metope gives us insight into the special relationship Athena has with the hero, whose path is always marked by enormous and glorious struggles in service to freedom. Among them is Heracles, one of whose 12 labors was to attain golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides. These apples were guarded by a huge serpent and Heracles needed the Titan Atlas to get the apples for him. For Atlas to do so, Heracles had to take Atlas’ cosmic burden, holding the heavens and the earth on his own back.

That is the moment depicted in this sculpture. Notice how the weight of the cosmos bears heavily on Heracles’ neck—he could be crushed by it. Athena stands behind him, he cannot see her, but her gentle touch on this enormous weight is what lightens it just enough to be bearable by the hero. As the classicist Walter Otto phrases it, “always she appears at the right moment as the true counsellor and helper of the mighty hero who proudly challenged monsters and paved his own path to the gods by glorious struggle.”[4] Heracles cannot see her so he believes it is his own strength that surges through him to do the impossible. But we know it is the goddess. This is a theme I will pick up in Part II and III of the essay.

As champion of heroes, Athena is pleased by courage and the willingness to fight for what one believes in.  It is said that she inspired in her favorites acts of honor and daring, both of which are majestic aspects of the Aries archetype. This may be part of the Neptune vision that we find ourselves impelled towards as we attempt to move our will in the world, fired up by a heroic vision for freedom and the striving, fighting, and conquesting needed to achieve it.

Athena and Saturn in Aries

Athena’s heroes are those who alongside their fierce courage and strength also can demonstrate restraint, clarity of perception, prudence and dignity. In the Iliad Achilles, angered by the insults of Agamemnon considers killing him. For a fleeting infinitesimal moment he waits and it is then that he feels Athena’s presence and meets her eyes, immediately understanding that if he is patient he will be recompensed and so he sheaths his sword. Athena’s power of forbearance prevails. Here is the affirming power of checking one’s emotion and desire-driven impulses—Saturn is the power of restraint.

Athena abandons warriors incapable of self-control. She is about to award immortal life to Tydeus when he goes berserk on the battle field, ripping open the skull of one he has slain so to drink his brains. Repulsed, the goddess turns away, leaving him to die because he had degraded himself. Tydeus personifies a side of Aries—the frenzied lust for action that blinds us to the effect of our actions on others and on ourselves. The consciousness that Saturn symbolizes—how we feel inhibited, restrained, blocked— in the Aries fire may be a necessary counterweight to the fiery crusader vision or berserker intensity of Neptune in Aries. “What Athena shows man, what she desires of him, and what she inspires him to, is boldness, will to victory, courage. But all of this is nothing without directing reason and illuminating clarity.”[5]

Athena’s wisdom is expressed in what is often described as her flashing eyes—a far seeing perceptiveness that leads to right or clear sighted action. Hence once of her animal familiars being the owl, whose large eyes makes them able to see all around and in the dark. As a metaphor, owl vision is an exquisite wise perceptiveness.

Drawing these meanings of the particular quality of sight associated with her, Athena personifies seeing as understanding. The Jungian analyst Ann Shearer translates this into psychological terms this way, “We must make sense of what we see if we are to act; we must assess and measure the evidence of our eyes if we are to act wisely. And when we do, it is Athene who is at work in us.”[6]

Let us consider Saturn whose gifts are slowing down in order to see what is happening, to reflect in order to understand. As the Renaissance astrologer Ficino put it, Saturn is the midwife of insight.[7]

Athena’s sharp perceptiveness can be brought into life through our willingness to slow down (Saturn) in order to regard with bright attention the call to action (Aries) stirring within us and reflecting, assessing, strategizing before acting. Saturnian qualities of the strategic mind under the aegis of Athena include civilized restraint and self-mastery over impulsive action. Freshness of Aries vision is in the capacity to see and hear clearly, not naively or impulsively.

Athena’s sight has the ability to see where the opportunity is, the opening for potential victory. Strategy is one of her gifts. Otto describes Athena as “the perfection of the living present,” which is what gave her the ability to see what was the best way to proceed in any situation for victory. In myth this was often related to battles and other tricky and complex situations.

The combination of forbearance in order to perceive accurately, to strategize action that leads to victory, describes a mature Aries consciousness. Saturn in Aries suggests that we are entering a time where those are among the attitudes and skills available to be consciously cultivated.

Saturn conjoining Neptune is the medicinal slowing down of the Aries fire which Neptune elevates into a subtle but pervasive heroic spiritual call. Where we feel our actions and willful plans hampered, delayed, maybe that is the psyche looking out for us. As Plato himself said, his daimon spoke to him in negatives. Perhaps we have an opportunity here to make room at a new level for the life affirming power of Saturn and limitation.

References

[1] A version of this essay was presented at the Fire and Air Summit at Astrology University in March 2025.

[2] The Letters of John Keats, ed. by H E Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge University Press, 1958), i. pp. 193-4

[3] Abraham Lincoln, “Letter to Henry L. Pierce and others,” April 6, 1859

[4] Walter Otto, The Homeric Gods (Thames and Hudson,1929), p. 47

[5] Walter Otto, The Homeric Gods (Thames and Hudson,1929), p.53

[6] Ann Shearer, Athene: Image and Energy (Viking Arcana, 1996), p. 19

[7] Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life (1489)

Passage through troubled waters requires we have a strong boat, a psychic vessel that can ride the surges and withstand the worst of the storms. As it happens, Saturn’s passage into Pisces offers us insight into the kind of craft that might endure the turbulent spirit of the times. Saturn entered Pisces on March 7 2023 where it will stay through February 14 2026.

Saturn is the archetypal psychological principle of form and stability. It symbolizes the inner and outer structures of our lives which comprise our sense of identity. It is also associated with processes of maturation. Saturn points to where there’s learning to be done, so it anchors us. One manifestation of this imperative is Saturn in the figure of teacher, the wise old one whose presence signifies a time of growth through dedication and focus upon the work at hand. Let’s thus turn to Saturn as teacher, as a source of insight that offers psychic medicine for the fluidity, uncertainty and instability that bounds us on all sides.

First medicinal capsule from Saturn as teacher: Adhering to psychological faith that there is something forming despite a difficult birth. Though ambiguous, there is something of value emerging. Psychological faith has to do with a strengthening of the personality, a greater capacity to live with uncertainty. It means developing “negative capability.”

This idea comes the Romantic poet John Keats. He defined negative capability as a skillfulness for “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”[1] It’s a way of being that finds value in not possessing knowledge, not being driven to work things out, not striving via reason towards knowing. Rather, a receptive, contemplative and attentive attitude towards what is unfolding and a “Willingness to let what is mysterious or doubtful remain just that” is what prevails. In other words, negative capability is related to a knowing more with the heart rather than with the reason-thinking mind.

Along these same lines, I love Denise Levertov’s image for our hunger for reason from the opening half of her poem “Contraband”[2]:

The tree of knowledge was the tree of reason.

That’s why the taste of it

drove us from Eden. That fruit

was meant to be dried and milled to a fine powder

for use a pinch at a time, a condiment.

God had probably planned to tell us later

about this new pleasure.

                              We stuffed our mouths full of it,

gorged on but and if and how and again

but, knowing no better.

It’s toxic in large quantities; fumes

swirled in our heads and around us

to form a dense cloud that hardened to steel,

A wall between us and God, Who was paradise.

Negative capability goes hand in hand with psychological faith because the negative knowing or embrace of uncertainty happening at our conscious ego level allows for confidence in the greater scheme of things taking shape in more unconscious ways. This sense of the larger intelligence at work in our lives is what the astro-cosmological perspective attempts to offer.

And there is a deeper rhythm at work here—the origin of negative capability is in a letter Keats wrote in December 1817 when Saturn was Pisces, so Keats’ idea was born under this same Saturn transit over 200 years ago.

Negative capability and psychological faith say the imaginal heart needs to lead. We learn about the gravity of the heart’s knowing through receptivity, and not impatiently reaching for a large mouthful of reason, understanding, clarity—throwing ourselves into the path of beauty so to behold it without always having to make sense of it. Our positive capability, which so often drives our way of being, has an opportunity to loosen and allow wild unknown possibilities to emerge—a Piscean receptivity to the creative unknown.

I think we are well aware of the challenges Saturn in Pisces given the spirit of the times—fear of chaos and of being overwhelmed by the formlessness, the unknowing, the uncertainties and ambivalences. This danger is conveyed in the mythos of the Sirens who would lure sailors to their deaths by promising divine knowledge. It is the heroic part of us that experiences the Sirens as devourers, as the greatest temptation of heroic consciousness strives to know as the gods. Heroic consciousness seeks clarity and the surety of knowing everything is under control. This hubris, which is part of the human condition, is the blind spot of ego consciousness.

This brings us to the second medicinal capsule of Saturn as teacher which is given by the goddess Circe. Counseling Odysseus as he prepares to enter the Siren’s waters, she tells him that he must bind himself to the mast of the ship so that he is not seduced by their song. Perhaps dealing with the Piscean Siren waters means being practiced in the art of self-binding, the skill of restraint to protect from ravishment. Listen to Circe’s instructions to Odysseus, “If anyone goes near them in ignorance, and listens to their voices, that man will never travel home.”[3] To listen to to the Sirens with heroic hubris is to perish, whereas to listen with an awareness of limitations, for where more or less boundaries are needed (Saturn), and with an understanding of what is at stake, we might hear what elevates the soul. Today this mythic moment plays our in the Siren call of the online world and some of the treacherous arenas of knowledge and deception that live there.

Odysseus being lashed to the mast of his ship and Penelope steadfastly seated at to her loom are both images of self-binding for containment. But Penelope and Odysseus also show us psychological faith in action—20 years she has faith he will return, and for the same 20 years he has faith he will return to her. The key to navigate these turbulent waters seems to be a strong vessel, our Saturn vessel, in which one can labore et orare, work and pray. The house Saturn is transiting in our birth chart, as well as the planets it will touch, show where this soul work is located. And there are many kinds of containers—a creative project, a close circle of friends, a meditation practice, active service to a cause, (re)entering soul work like analysis—anything that we dedicate ourselves to with with faith in the psyche, with heart knowing, all the while learning to make space for mystery.

 “The Wind Has Died”

My little boat,

Take care,

There is no

Land in sight.

—Charles Simic

[1] The Letters of John Keats, ed. by H E Rollins,, 2 vols (Cambridge University Press, 1958), i. pp. 193-4

[2] Evening Train (New Directions, 1992)

[3] The Odyssey, trans. by Emily Wilson (Norton, 2018), p. 302

This winter our threshold crossing into the new year is marked by a handful of significant astrological events. These include the third, final square of Saturn and Uranus with their conflicting demands for stasis and change on December 23rd, and Jupiter entering its native sign of Pisces on December 28th, signaling a qualitative shift in how we will be drawn to seek meaning through May of 2022. 

A less grand but equally important celestial movement in the inner sky is Venus in Capricorn turning retrograde on December 19th. Her retrograde dance occurs every 18 months, signaling a time in which reassessing our values becomes a priority. To what and with whom do we want to devote our time and energy? What do we find beautiful and worthy of our attention? What is the state of our self-value? What do we really cherish? Venus poses all these questions, beckoning us to slow down so to consider the presence or absence in our life of what we truly find important. 

This Venus retrograde in Capricorn invites turning our attention to the inner hearth, to assess how well our value-fires are burning and what fuel they need to be kindled anew. It suggests being at the altar of the goddess Hestia, whom the Greeks and Romans worshipped as the living flame upon the hearth that burned day and night. In the Olympian zodiac Hestia rules Capricorn, which underscores the interior and meditative dimension of the sign.[i]

Hestia is a style of consciousness concerned with focusing our awareness inward and going deeper.  Kindling the flames of interior space Hestia sanctifies turning inward. This requires patience because this Venus retrograde signifies a period of slowing down and turning back so to sort, retrieve, and discover what matters to us now. Hestia and Capricorn are both touched by the Senex—the aging authority who values slow processes that lead to wisdom. We may find ourselves facing a pile of ashes, recognizing what once carried our spark has in fact burned out. We may find that how we relate to a loved one needs reimagining. We may be faced with how we have been living in accord with values that are not our own but our family’s or the collective’s.  That Venus is dancing beside Pluto when she turns suggests that part of what we may come to see and reckon with are husks that offer no fuel to our fire and must be let go.

Retrograde counsel includes pausing to be receptive to the shifts that are underway. At the altar of Hestia the goddess beckons presence rather than action. We could say that this goddess calls us to sacrifice our impulse to do and relinquish the allure of busyness and needing making things happen. Hestia consciousness is not attuned to doing, rather to a deep attentiveness to what is arising. At times we must cover our eyes to prepare for, and fully receive, an emerging in-sight. 

In this dark I rest,

unready for the light which dawns

day after day,

eager to be shared.

Black silk, shelter me.

I need more of the night before I open

eyes and heart

to illumination. I must still

grow in the dark like a root

Not ready, not ready at all.

—“Eye Mask” by Denise Levertov

Resting in the darkness may be just the medicine we need at the end of a long and trying year. As Hestia’s flame burns quietly in our interior hearth, beyond its immediate pool of light, soft darkness holds us. 

Hestia’s meditative strength can be imagined in many different ways. There are all sorts of practices to help rediscover your Venusian values and feed your fire including journaling as an excavation to uncover what is alive with its energy and what is not. The warm attention of a close friend in long conversation can make for the right kindling of insight. Being out in nature can allow the inner world to reveal itself in syncopation with your beating heart under the open sky. 

Hestia personifies the power of containment, which I’ve previously described as “the necessary condition for the slow gestation of being the occurs in the deep recesses of one’s virginal interiority. This indwelling is the precondition for action rooted in authenticity.”[ii] The potential of this period is a renewed clarity around what truly matters if we are willing to mask our eyes from the world’s 24/7 light-filled demands and listen for the knowing that wants to be heard. 

At the end of her retrograde on January 29th, Venus will conjoin with Vesta, the asteroid bearing Hestia’s Roman name which is represented by a flame. As an astrological principle, Vesta symbolizes exactly what I’ve shared here—that to which we are devoted and dedicate our precious and limited resources of attention, time and energy. The astrological and mythic synchrony is breathtaking. These two goddesses will clasp hands and slowly, gracefully, dance together for over a month into early March. These may be days where our renewed sense of what matters, where we find beauty and what we love becomes part of the foundations for building and moving ahead (Capricorn), grounded in our values.  

Come on into this house of mine,

Hestia,

be gracious towards my song.

Notes

[i] In the Olympian zodiac 6 goddesses and 6 gods rules the signs as opposed to planets. See Ariel Guttman Mythic Astrology (2004), Rupert Gleadow The Origin of the Zodiac (1968).

[ii] Safron Rossi, The Kore Goddess: A Mythology & Psychology (2021), p. 70 

Penelope’s weaving, a gift of the goddess Athena, is a motif that bears multivalent meaning in The Odyssey. For one, it can be understood in relation to the poetic narrative of the epic, as any great story is a tale woven into form employing words like threads. We can also think about the weaving motif in relation to Odysseus who is trying to make his way home and is thwarted at various times by Poseidon, and even his own crew, and literally goes backwards, farther away from Ithaca than before — ‘weaving’ his way home.

Whereas the epic treats Odysseus’ many adventures on his journey home, Penelope is on her own journey if we look at her weaving in a certain way. Perhaps the current circumstances of our Covid-19 world presents—confined movements, limited outward excursions and contact with others—gives us an insight into Penelope’s style of journeying. Unlike Odysseus who spent years on distant shores, from the battlefield of Troy and Calypso’s sweet scented island, to sailing through foreign seas meeting exotic people and strange creatures, Penelope was home. Her movements were free within the confines of the domestic sphere and her whereabouts familiar—the same faces, same food, same views.

Yet, she traveled far. Her weaving was the journey through time to the present moment when Odysseus returns. By going back and forth over the vertical threads with her shuttle she wove her way forward. In undoing those very threads each night, she could weave herself onward again. Undoing and doing, unraveling and raveling, this rhythm carried her on, day after day. Her fingertips traveled a thousand thread leagues. Haven’t these many months allowed us to experience Penelope’s style of journeying? Have we not been pressed to learn something about the uses of confinement and the passage of time?[ii]

René Guénon’s study on the symbolism of weaving in The Symbolism of the Cross reveals cosmic dimensions of the metaphor. On the loom, the warp refers to the vertical threads that are formed and create the foundation of the weave. The weft (or woof) are the horizontal threads made by the shuttle passing through the warp. In cosmic terms, the warp corresponds to the archetypal or divine principles of the world and the weft is the time, place and conditions in which those archetypal energies manifest. The Hindu concept of Śruti, the vertical warp, corresponds to the transcendent principles of the universe. Smṛti, the horizontal weft, is the human interpretations and applications of those principles in life. Together these threads weave the world as a garment of divinity. In another beautiful metaphor, Śruti is compared to the light of the Sun and Smṛti to the light of the Moon, the two luminaries symbolizing not only the eternal and temporal but also masculine and feminine energies in the universe.[iii]

What does this symbol of the loom offer for our contemplation of day to day experience? I would like to have us listen to it in relationship to our inner lives, the life of the psyche grounded in the archetypal patterns of nature. So much of contemporary culture privileges our outer world orientation at the great expense of our interior compass. Penelope’s journey challenges the notion that life happens only in relation to the world out there. It is as if it’s only when we are in an Odyssean epic and dealing with outer life and its collective human activities, that anything of value is going on. In James Hillman’s words, “Events are not essential to the soul’s experiencing.  It does not need many dreams or many loves or city lights.  We have records of great souls that have thrived in a monk’s cell, a prison, or a suburb.  But there must be a vision of what is happening, deep ideas to create experience.”[iv] Those deep ideas are the vertical warp threads of the archetypal imagination, which astrology, myths, poetry and art render visible.

Penelope’s patient weaving and humble unraveling presents a paradox in terms of journeys. To undo what she has done means to go backward, start again—no forward progress.  Yet it is the unraveling that keeps the story moving. The unraveling is what requires the spinning of new threads. In psychological terms the unraveling is a metaphor for old attitudes and habits, frames of mind undone in order for new threads and new patterns to emerge. Penelopean loom work means traveling to interior reaches where the warp and weft meet in such a way that kindle the light of deep experience.

In astrological terms, Penelope’s unraveling is the magic of retrograde cycles, which is when the planets appear to move backwards. In relation to the cosmos at this time, we are now at the beginning of Mars’ retrograde in Aries, a period lasting from September 9th to November 14th. The sensibility at work in Penelope, her style of loom journeying provides a metaphor for the imaginative possibilities of this Mars retrograde. Mars symbolizes life’s forward drive, and as the warrior of the Sun it is the force of activity and courage to pursue our vision and call (in Aries the desire is to do this with vigor, enthusiasm and haste). During Mars’ retrograde, inner focusing is invited as counterbalance to the momentum that defines its usual emphasis on doing. We could say the vitality of Mars during a retrograde becomes more lunar in that it becomes more receptive to inner connections and awareness.

A Penelopean approach to Mars retrograde is not so much about moving forward but kindling some inner light. It invites a greater capacity to paying attention to how our courage, purpose and will live inside us. It could be an inner pursuit for understanding how we use our energy, which would inform what we do and how we move once the paths open up again. And they will.

[i] Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles, p. 394

[ii] Pressures abound as the Saturn-Pluto conjunction reflects our perceptions and responses to life in the pandemic. It strikes me that a similar psychic reality was afoot for Penelope. At the start of The Odyssey, she has lived for years in a cloud of not knowing whether Odysseus was alive or dead. In addition to that, could we not imagine that the suitors who came to Penelope’s house each day pressuring her to remarry one of them provoked her survival instincts and fears not only for herself but her son?

[iii] In Joseph Campbell’s Asian Journals he describes Śruti as, “harkening to the voice of the living God, the Muse”[iii] and notes how these two concepts also communicate the polarity of knowing (Śruti), and seeking (Smṛti), which add another level to the cosmic dimension of the warp and weft.

[iv] Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 122

Note: A non-astrological version of this essay was published in the Joseph Campbell Foundation Myth Blast series, August 2020.

Image credit: “Penelope Unraveling Her Work at Night” (1886) by Dora Wheeler (1856–1940)
Silk embroidered with silk thread, 45 x 68 in. (114.3 x 172.7 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The kinds of change that Saturn-Pluto signify combine in varying configurations and levels of intensity, shaped by Saturn’s retentive pressure and Pluto’s removal of all but what is essential. This can look like processes of transformation (Pluto) through contraction and limitation (Saturn). Pressures around responsibility (Saturn) building the heat necessary to reveal what is of deep necessity or value (Pluto).

In Capricorn the way these changes are being expressed, their tonality, is an earthy vigorous one. An active seeding energy, Capricorn wants to build. This can be seen in the way the heat stays on, so to speak, with ongoing issues and events keeping our attention on the underlying matters that are indicated by the house they are transiting in our birth chart.  

But make no mistake about it, Saturn-Pluto also has to do with falling apart, as Saturn symbolizes structures (outer and inner) and Pluto the inexorable processes of transformation. Whatever life structure, habitual attitude, relationship, or story no longer provides real sustenance to the psyche, in other words is no serving life, Pluto comes along to dismantle. In the language of biology, Pluto is a decomposer who, like fungi and bacteria, “break down the chemical bonds that hold the molecules of dead things together and release the main elements of life from their corporal bonds, freeing them to be used again.”[i] There are an awful lot of endings going but all this decomposing is for the sake of new life. Pluto arrives showing us how our energy that is trapped in old complexes and worn out situations is ripe for resurrection.

If there is a divinity, a movement of consciousness, who sees the value of this process for the sake of soulmaking, it is Hekate, goddess of garbage and magic.

I think Hekate offers us insight into the kind of consciousness most conducive to navigating this time because it is she who witnesses what is afoot, understanding with her night vision that falling apart is necessary at times.

Hekate was the goddess of crossroads, the trivium or place where three roads meet. In the classical era she became associated with the underworld, the ghosts of the dead and magic, and the cloaked face of the dark moon. These show how Hekate has to do with liminality because crossroads, the moon and magic all deal with transitions and change.

This is one of the keys to Hekate’s relationship to Persephone. When Hades abducts Persephone from a field where she is alone gathering flowers, Hekate is the only one who hears Persephone’s cries as she descends into the underworld in Hades’ chariot, the only witness to Persephone’s change of being as she goes from daughter to wife and Queen. Hekate pays attention at the thresholds. She personifies a perspective in the psyche that watches, listens to our struggles with calm and full attention.

Hekate is that aspect of our consciousness where we, Hillman writes, “observe our own catastrophes with a dark wisdom that expects nothing else.”[ii] Her expecting nothing else is not nihilism, rather it is her understanding that entering the underworld, the dark night of the soul or falling apart are part of the deal. And there is soul involved when things go wrong. Hekate’s witnessing at the thresholds of these dark passages reminds us that this too is a sacred place and therefore there is something of value here.

To bring Hekate consciousness to the Saturn–Pluto conjunction means not asking “why is this happening”, rather “what is the soul purpose of this event (the falling away, the changes, the losses, endings, and even our resistances to these movements)?”

I mentioned Hekate was the goddess of garbage. In her religious cult practices household garbage and food scraps were sacrificed to her.[iii] These “suppers of Hekate” were laid at crossroads for the goddess at the new moon. This is deep magic – to take our waste, the stuff we don’t see any use for or do not want to eat, our dirty, hopeless messes and turn them over as offerings to the goddess. We look for the myth in the mess of our lives and remember that Hekate’s blessing is to “make sacred the waste of life, so that it all counts, it all matters”, says Hillman.[iv]

So the myth in the mess of the Saturn–Pluto transit, if they are transiting your 2nd house, may have to do with taking responsibility for what matters to you and discovering what you have to offer the world requires relinquishing old attitudes and attachments. If they are transiting your 7th house, the development of inner authority is necessitating changes in how you relate to others, what you need in your relationships.

Throughout the year the Capricorn stellium will be touched by the Moon as she moves through the zodiac every two days. The Moon is a manifester, so paying attention to what the Moon is doing in relation to what is coming up in your life can help create some insight into the changes Saturn–Pluto are seeking. That Hekate was worshipped at new and full moons underscores the invitation to pay attention to the lunar rhythm at this time. May it be illuminating.

[i] Eugenia Bone, “Decomposition: An Easter Story”, The New York Times 3/31/18

[ii] James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld (1979), p. 49

[iii] Lewis Richard Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States volume II (1896)

[iv] James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld (1979), p. 40

“Do you have the discipline to be a free spirit?”

Great questions lead into unknown idea chambers—and this particular one posed by Roth with its paradoxical synthesis of discipline and freedom offers a key to the Saturn-Neptune sextile that is quietly humming throughout the year. Dates for the three exact contacts: January 31, June 18, and November 8.

Saturn has to do with the matter of our lives and what matters. His concern lies in our developing a skillful mastery of those things, be it practical day to day stuff or deep interior work. Saturn keeps our feet to the ground, anchoring us to the current reality. (Saturn’s Greek name was Chronos which is the root for linear time, chronological.) Whatever house he is occupying by transit in our chart is where we feel the pressure and weightiness of what really matters, demanding our attention to the tasks related to those things. 

Where Saturn moors us, Neptune pulls us up to the realm of spirit. It is the Neptunian force that draws our attention to realms that transcend the here and now, and those portals can be most anything—unifying ideas and philosophies, creative inspiration, dreams, altered states of consciousness and even madness. And with Neptune in its own sign of Pisces, it makes possible a more sensitized awareness to the realm of the spirit in its various guises.  

What does the conversation between these two archetypal forces look like in life? While there are many forms that can convey this dynamic, what captures my imagination is dance. Recently I have watched a number of dance documentaries and I found one artist that bewitched me—Margot Fonteyn, the great British ballerina.  In what is an extraordinary synchronicity, May 18th, the day I began to compose this article, would have been Fonteyn’s 100th birthday.

To watch Fonteyn dance is to witness something of the Neptunian spirit flow down through the vessel of her body. She exhibits an extraordinary physical control and a simultaneous surrender to the animating spirit. She is free and yet intensely embodied. Soaring in flight and tethered to the ground, she defies gravity with beauty. It is the Saturnian discipline of flesh and bone that makes possible this incarnation of the Neptunian vision, where the ineffable is made manifest, and it is breathtaking. In her biographer’s words:

Another image of this archetypal combination is Ariadne who was also known to be a beautiful dancer. In the powerful novel Circe, Circe is walking through the palace of Knossos and stops to regard a courtyard.

It is Ariadne who is dancing the sacred spiral, for she is the priestess of the labyrinth mysteries. The labyrinth is a great Saturnian metaphor for life, with its restrictive twists and turns, bounded paths, dark corners and dead ends leading us, through endurance to a hidden goal. As its priestess, Ariadne is the keeper of the red thread that can keep one from becoming irrevocably lost on the labyrinthine path, as it is her thread that weaves in and out, guiding one into the mystery and out again. Holding to her thread, we are given a means to make the connection between spirit and matter – between the matter of our lives and something of the ineffable spirit that suffuses it. It is this conjunction of spirit and matter that expresses one face of the Saturn-Neptune pair.

Let us imagine Ariadne’s dancing thread as Neptune’s sextile to Saturn, calling our attention to an opportunity to weave something of the ineffable and magical Neptunian realm into our perspective and experience of the Saturnian matters of our lives at this time. Look to the houses these planets are transiting so to draw out the Neptune thread to be woven into those life matters Saturn is working. If you have the discipline, portals for the spirit can open.

Works Cited

Daneman, M. (2004). Margot Fonteyn, New York, NY: Viking.

Miller, M. (2018). Circe, New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company.

Here we are. Behind us are the end of year holidays that many spend with kith and kin, and these first few days of the New Year bring that feeling for a fresh start, with aspirations and plans for what is to come over the many months.  Past and future intermingle like Janus’ two faces espying what has been and what is to come.

In a passage by the great Jungian analyst and writer Marie-Louise von Franz[i] the importance of our attitude in these threshold times is brought to the fore. von Franz had gone to visit old relatives, experienced as “old horrors”, whom she made fun of in her mind on her way home. That night she had a “catastrophic dream”, wherein she knew the unconscious was saying to her, “this is really dangerous.” Recounting the visit and dream to Jung, she recalls him saying to her,

"Yes. If one does not constantly walk forward, the past sucks one back. The past is like an enormous sucking wind that sucks one back all the time.  If you don't walk forward, you regress. You have constantly to carry the torch of the new light forward, so to speak, historically and also in your own life. As soon as you begin to look backward sadly, or even scornfully, it has you again. The past is a tremendous power."[ii]

Astrologically, that which has us walk forward is symbolized by Mars. This is why Mars’ sign of Aries is the first sign of the zodiac because it is the quality of consciousness of beginnings whose instinctive need is movement.

Cosmic syncopation—the New Year began with Mars at 0 degrees Aries, firing up this consciousness of beginnings.

Aries is also the first fire sign of the zodiac, and fire starts with a spark. It is this spark that is needed to light the torch Jung describes. And this torch of light is a metaphor for the spark of consciousness. Mars is connected to the articulation of consciousness in many deep ways. His territory includes our will, how we defend what we value and the courage we have to move forward in life based on our principles.

Mars is that torch we must constantly carry into our life, which, though rooted in the past needs to illuminate what’s ahead. Let’s imagine this as a fire in the mind. For the Romans, Mars’ power manifested itself, “in fertility and in strength and fierceness and which was associated with an appearance of fire in the head.”[iii]  Hence the woodpecker picus Martius was believed to be sacred to Mars because of the scarlet streak of feathers on its otherwise black head.

With Mars currently in Aries the message is very clear, we must tap into the courage to move forward consciously and with an enthusiasm for what unfolds, all the while with due respect for the past.

With fire kindling care.

[i] Thank you to the C.G. Jung Study Center of Southern California whose New Year’s email (1/3/19) included this quotation for reflection.

[ii] Marie-Louise von Franz, The Cat: A Tale of Feminine Redemption, 129

[iii] Onians, The Origins of European Thought, 471

Magic is made in a circle. These circles are drawn to consecrate the time and space in which the powers are raised and dispersed. It’s the creation of an enclosed and sacred space, a microcosm.

In Greek myth, the great sorceress Circe is an herbalist, spell crafter and demi-goddess. Her father is Helios (the Sun) and her mother Perseis, an Oceanid, though some say Hecate. Circe or Kirke comes from the feminine form of kirkos which Kerenyi says means, “circling birds of prey…circling ambulation of the wolf and in Homer the hawk”[i]. This circling motion is a honing in on the sustaining food. This is also Mars territory, the instinct to dive, thrust and bite. Fearlessness and a keen nose for competition can be seen in Mars’ sign Aries.

In this season of Scorpio the issue of right mixtures and right pressures in our processes of transformation is writ large, and in order to understand Scorpio we have to remember its ancient ruler is Mars.

Scorpio shows us the transformative power of Mars, where Mars is put to the use of union and sharing rather than cutting. Scorpio unifies the right elements, which is a requirement for magic. All sorcerers and alchemists need their accoutrements and ingredients.  Circe the sorceress knows what to use (Mars) to affect the transformations (Scorpio) she desires. The art of transformation, whether imaginal or concrete, psychological or physical, requires knowing what is needed to make for the conditions of change.

How do we do that? Scorpio has to do with testing. In testing our psychological limits, the efficacy and trueness of things helps us know what is too much, or not enough.

Venus went retrograde in Scorpio on October 6th. All retrogrades are about repairing our relationship to those principles sacred to that divinity. With Venus we are dealing with issues of what matters, what and who we love. Scorpio gives Venus the heat of honest and intense expression of just what is of value. What needs to change in the manner of how you handle what you love? Perhaps there’s been too much pressure applied? Where does there need to be some loosening of the bonds and complications that Scorpio is very good at weaving? Where is receptivity and flow, Venus’ gentle touch, needed?  Or maybe it’s the opposite and more heat, more devotion is required.   

Cast a circle in your awareness and explore what this Venus Scorpio ground is about. Look to your chart, study the house she is transiting. How has she shown up, and how are you responding? Venus will not enter Sagittarius until January 7th, so these questions remain open for reflection for some time. Venus will rise as the Morning Star on October 31st, the ancient holy day of Samhain. Let’s keep our eye on the light that shines from the deep and offers opportunities for transformation and magic.  

[i] Kerenyi, Goddesses of Sun and Moon, 11.

Painting entitled “The Magic Circle” (1886), John William Waterhouse [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Mars symbolizes our instinct to move forward and the intelligence of action, so during a Mars retrograde those activities can feel turned upside down, suspended.

This apparent slowing down, which we can feel internally (and physically) as well as meet externally, is natural because retrogrades are potent periods of review and repair. The slowing down gives us an opening to reflect on our life and modes of being.

For quite a long time Parsifal, one of the knights of King Arthur’s Round Table, wanders around the woods where he first found the Grail Castle. Having not asked the right questions the first time he entered the Castle, he spends years seeking the Castle for a second chance. We find that in order for him to be graced with another opportunity, a lot of his young Mars energy has to mature. That maturing process in his case includes learning how to be in periods of aimlessness and even loss. This is how I interpret those times Parsifal gets off his horse (quite a big deal for a knight on quest), allowing it to graze in a field while he sits under a tree and does nothing. Parsifal’s wandering around the same woods for years is about going over ground covered before to reconsider and learn something based on experience, as well as through trial and error. 

Locating where Mars is transiting by house in your chart shows what area has been calling for a review. Currently in Capricorn, Mars is concerned with integrity. How are your actions aligned with your sense of purpose? Where have you been caught up in doing for doing’s sake? What behaviors are no longer effective and in need of honest review and repair? 

Mars is seeking a kind of realignment so that we can trust our decisions and forward momentum are based on a well-defined sense of what is right.  In a philosophical sense Mars is related to what we would call right action. Knowing at any given time what is right action necessitates a sense of the ground on which we stand. That is the magic of any retrograde, it is the psyche’s call for a going over the ground so to know it all the more deeply.

If you prefer to download/print, a PDF of the article can be found here. 

Originally published in The Mountain Astrologer, Feb/March 2018     

© Safron Rossi

Waves Become Wings: Neptune, Betrayal and the Myth of Ariadne   

        “I do not know what to do/two states of mind in me,” (1) sings the ancient Greek poet Sappho. These lines could as well be about Neptune, whose themes belong to a watery realm where contradictions undulate. Inspiration, imagination, universal love, compassion, faith and trust exist right alongside sacrifice, illusions, confusion, deception, insanity, lies and abandonment. The grace and suffering that Neptune brings, seen in our birth charts and transits, is breathtaking, time and again exhibiting this two-faced behavior. How do we wrap our minds around these conflicting meanings of Neptune? In taking up the task of deepening our understanding of this planet I want to turn to the amplificatory power of myth by which we can understand its archetypal pattern. First, a closer look at Neptune’s web of meaning.

 Neptune is the archetype of the ideal, the ineffable, transcendent, imaginal, and timeless. One of its images is the ocean of consciousness upon which the boundaries between oneself and other, oneself and the divine are dissolved so that what is separate merges into a greater whole.  Universal love and compassion come from this boundless oceanic yearning of fusion with all life. Neptune represents the longing for the ideal world, the paradisal garden where there is no separation from the divine source. It is in this vein that we can understand its connection to the themes of redemption and purification. (2) While all spiritual traditions express this in their own particular way, ultimately this is the yearning to free oneself from the burden of incarnation and return to the divine source. Symbols related to this ideal place of belonging or true home are the watery womb of the Mother or the protective embrace of the Father. In psychological terms, this is related to primal trust. Yet, where there is trust, there is also betrayal, which James Hillman explores in his brilliant essay "Betrayal", for we are only betrayed by those to whom we have given our trust. He writes, "Wherever there is trust in a union, the risk of betrayal becomes a real possibility. And betrayal, as a continual possibility to be lived with, belongs to trust as doubt belongs to a living faith."(3)  

 Finding psychological value in the dark and shadowy aspects of human experience can be challenging. But a respect for the dark side of the psyche means valuing the suffering of the soul—what Hillman called pathologizing. Our wounds are agents of metamorphosis in our lives because they can lead to greater consciousness. Soul-making begins with wounding, for the gods force themselves through symptoms into our lives. Hillman writes, “Only in mythology does pathology receive an adequate mirror, since myths speak with the same distorted, fantastic language.” (4) In this manner astrology and the myths embedded within its symbolism help us understand and value our suffering. For the ways in which our trust has been betrayed are paradoxically the places wherein consciousness is deepened, widened. Neptune is very much associated with such dynamics.

While there are a number of mythic figures that have been explored in relation to Neptune, when it comes to the theme of trust and betrayal we can turn to the myth of Ariadne, the Greek princess who gave aid to the hero Theseus.

      Entering Neptune’s realm requires abandoning dry land for watery depths, so Ariadne’s home on the island of Crete immediately places us in the fitting mythic terrain. Natural places of isolation and distance, islands are resonate with 12th house symbolism (Neptune’s domain) as places of retreat, reclusion, disappearance and secrets.  Crete is not only an island kingdom, but home of a great labyrinth which houses at its center the Minotaur. Neptune’s hand in the guise of deception is a prime mover in this tale. It begins when Pasiphae, the Queen of Crete, fell in love with a magnificent white bull that emerged from the sea, a manifestation of the god Poseidon—the Greek name for Neptune. This magical bull is symbolic of the incredible fecundity of the imagination, and its whiteness suggests purity and a spiritualized nature. It's rising from the ocean represents the creative potency of the watery realm, which is a primary metaphor of the unconscious. Enthralled by this creature, Pasiphae convinced the master craftsman Daedalus to construct a cow into which she could climb, thereby deceiving the bull and taking him as her lover. She became pregnant and gave birth to the Minotaur, whose body was a man's but had the head of a bull. Because of his monstrous appearance, Daedalus again was called upon but this time to build a labyrinth to both imprison and hide the Minotaur.

Ariadne was daughter of Queen Pasiphae and King Minos, and thus the Minotaur’s half-sister. She was called Mistress of the Labyrinth because she knew its secrets and how to move in and back out again without losing her life.  This is the knowledge she gifts to Theseus, the heroic son of Poseidon (Neptune) who pretends to be one of the sacrificial Athenian youths brought to the labyrinth in an annual tribute. Ariadne bids Theseus to not just kill her half-brother, but to make the death a sacred act by offering it to his father Poseidon as a sacrifice.

Sacrifice is an act of making sacred, which undertaken with a different attitude would merely be profane bloodlust. Invoking the gods, paying attention and giving due to greater consciousness is a Neptunian theme. Through devotion to something greater than one's self interests means recognizing that one's creativity (Sun) or passion (Venus) are not one's own possessions but rather gifts from the gods. This is one way—through a sacrificial attitude—Neptune's spiritualizing pressures can be managed.

Entering the labyrinth is like descending into the underworld, and in the island mythology of Crete it was believed to be a water realm. Both the labyrinth and the underworld are metaphors for descent into the unconscious, a descent by which consciousness grows. As Joseph Campbell was fond of saying, in the cave of our greatest fear lies the greatest treasure. The Cretan labyrinth with the stalking Minotaur is a twisted pathway, a journey that gives rise to deeper consciousness of the soul because it incorporates the shadow, those parts of ourselves which we judge as monstrous and therefore split off from our self-image. The Minotaur’s name was Asterion which means ‘of the stars’ suggesting that what is hideous can also be divine, but this depends entirely on how one sees.

Ariadne becomes Theseus’ collaborator in this sacrificial act and helps him navigate and return from the maze by using a ball of golden thread to retrace his steps. Her thread represents what keeps us connected when we are utterly turned around, confused, lost in the midst of Neptune transits.  The thread can be a person in our life, or a sense of meaning about what is happening. No matter what or who becomes the thread that leads us out of the maze, a connection to life is maintained even when we feel afloat in the darkest of seas.

When Theseus remerges victorious, he and Ariadne flee Crete and set sail for Athens where they plan to marry.  At this point in the story the first betrayals have occurred—Ariadne has betrayed her family not only by revealing the secrets of the labyrinth and assisting in her brother’s death, but by forsaking Crete and leaving her family and home behind. At the same time, Ariadne has taken a Neptunian leap and surrendered to the unknown. So here we see the two sides. She has fallen in love, and meaning now lies in those overwhelming tidal energies that draw her to Theseus. The rapture of the merging of two souls by love is one of Neptune’s siren songs. Drawn away from what was familiar and safe, she sets sail on ambiguous waters. Neptune journeys are those that dissolve the hold of Saturnian realities. That is the power of fantasy whose vehicles include films, music, and reveries—all are ways in which we are drawn beyond ourselves into imaginal realms that are infused with a sense of our greater selves. 

 On their way to Athens, their ship sets anchor off the island of Dia, and Ariadne and Theseus go to shore for a little while. Unaccountably, Ariadne becomes tired and lies down to rest and falls asleep. Surrendering to Neptune's dream realm, when she awakes she is alone and the ship is nowhere in her sight. She has been abandoned on the island by her beloved. Now betrayed herself, she comes to see Theseus in a cold light. Where she believed him a hero he has now shown himself a coward. Where she believed he spoke truthfully of love and marriage she hears now only his guile in pursuit of his aims. Alone on the island, the enchantment has broken, and she emerges from what appears to have been a Neptunian fog. When our trust or faith is betrayed, a primal need for security is broken. That any person or philosophy or group can unfalteringly love us, do us no harm and always be aligned with our needs is itself a Neptunian fantasy. A certain kind of Neptunian betrayal is the disillusionment that comes sometimes with spiritual quests and gurus. On one hand there is this great spiraling upward to inspiration and divine connection and then all of a sudden a rude awakening or disillusionment.

This tells us something about betrayal and how it functions to separate us from our unconscious investment of security and surety in others. We are thrown back on ourselves, wounded, but through the wounding comes consciousness. Ariadne's abandonment and betrayal by Theseus was the precondition to coming to this point. Betrayal is often a necessary experience for the deepening of consciousness and may appear in retrospect to be a necessity in the process of psychological maturity. Being alone, faced with what happened, reconciling to the experience, lead to her maturity.

What happens next is astounding. The god Dionysus finds her on this little island, “having come from heaven wrapped in a purple cloak.” (5) He falls in love with her and she with him; so deep is their love that when they marry she becomes an immortal and he remains eternally true to her. Marrying a god symbolizes consciousness joined to something essential. Places of isolation and abandonment can also hold the heart of the Neptunian mystery of bliss and sorrow, trust and betrayal.

So idealism and innocence as well as betrayal and deception are related to the Neptune archetype because they are psychologically intertwined.  Neptune's place in our birth-charts shows where we can connect with, and feel, one with a greater reality—areas of our lives that are infused with a sense of the sacred. Yet, those are the same areas of life where we can feel the victim, ravaged by disillusionment and loneliness.

The wounds of betrayal that Neptune constellates in our charts are all too real. How do we make sense of these experiences for ourselves, our clients and loved ones? Hillman's essay on the psychology of betrayal explores this theme with great care and insight. He writes, "betrayal—going back on a promise, refusing to help, breaking a secret, deceiving in love—is too tragic an experience to be justified in personal terms of psychological mechanisms and motives. Personal psychology is not enough, analysis and explanation will not do. One must look to the wide context of love and fate." (6) This wider context is given to us in myth. Myths and the archetypal figures within them provide a larger context within which to place our individual suffering. And in this way, our experiences can perhaps become meaningful because they are not only personal. Placing our individual pain into the larger container of myth is itself therapeutic. This is equally the power of astrology which places our experiences in relationship to our nature as symbolized by our birth chart, at the same time connecting us qualitatively to time as symbolized by transits. The meaningful pattern-making that astrology offers can be medicine for the shipwrecked human spirit.

Ariadne's myth shows the archetypal necessity and the potential meaning in the ineffable mysteries of Neptune. Her journey illustrates how the movement of innocent trust to betrayal to reconciliation is a process of consciousness, and deepens our way of working with Neptune so to help reconcile ourselves with the experiences he brings.

References and Notes

1. Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, translated by Anne Carson, Vintage Books, 2002, p. 107.

2. Liz Greene has written about this at length in The Astrological Neptune and the Quest for Redemption, Weiser, 2000.

3. James Hillman, “Betrayal” in Senex and Puer, Spring Publications, 2005, p. 196.

4. James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, Harper Perennial, 1975, p. 99.

5. Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, translated by Anne Carson, Vintage Books, 2002, p. 113.

6. James Hillman, “Betrayal” in Senex and Puer, Spring Publications, 2005, p. 208.

Aries is ruled by Mars, the god of war-lust and belligerence, who personifies the archetypal principles of action, ambition, drive and will power. The qualities of an Aries consciousness include impulsivity, rushing forth into things (hastily), enthusiasm and life-zest. Also, aggression and rebellion.

This web of qualities is connected to the archetypal nature of beginnings. Aries marks the spring point in the zodiac where new life emerges from the primal sea of being (Pisces and the 12th house). New life of any form needs fierce energy to burst forth and break through. Chicks pecking their way out of shells, tender shoots pushing up from beneath fecund soil exemplify this moment. So Aries, the fierce ram, rushes in supplying the necessary energy to ensure the new emerges.

But like all things in life, the Mars energy, so exquisitely expressed in Aries, has a lot of room to mature. Mars in its raw expression is force for the sake of action. A more sophisticated Martial energy can be found in Athena, who the Romans renamed Minerva.

This is what I understand this fresco depicting. Athena, the goddess for whom action is taken when it ensures victory.  She is a war goddess, not because she loves the brutality and rush of the fight, but because battles require strategy.

Athena personifies the clear sighted action necessary for strategic thinking. She is the shrewd calculator of possibilities. You have to have a cool head and clear vision. So it is no wonder that Athena’s Homeric epithet was Glaukopis meaning bright eyes. Her animal familiar the owl likewise has large eyes and an intelligent countenance that connotes clarity of perception.   

Athena’s triumph is the “Perfection in the living present, untrammelled and victorious action, not in the service of some remote and infinite idea but for mastery of the moment”[i].

Mastery of the moment is the genius of a refined Mars. This is what the fresco seems to be revealing. Athena’s earthy-red cape flutters as she hovers on the back of Aries Ram. Despite his leaping vigor, she is calm and her posture is serenely attentive. Unhurried and without agitation, Athena rides this instinctive force of life with ease. Her finely wrought  hands suggest mastery and precision. A golden sun shines below.

Mars’ current transit through Capricorn amplifies these Athenian themes. Key phrases that come to mind are strategic action, the cultivation of strong foundations, and acting deliberately rather than impulsively. There is also the Renaissance maxim festina lente, make haste slowly.

Imagining Athena within the astrological Mars brings forth brilliant, clever, and strategic capacities. She who, “is the spirited immediacy, redeeming spiritual presence, swift action”[ii] gives us a feminine face to this part of our nature.

What is it you want to accomplish at this time? What are the deliberate actions you need to take to get there? These are the sorts of questions that pay homage to Athenian consciousness and the current transit of Mars in Capricorn. Clarity, shrewd perception, measured steps and patience – this is Athena’s triumph over Aries.  

May these images open up some imaginal possibilities as you begin again, entering this new zodiacal year with a spirited and well measured leap.  

PS: If you want to explore more about Athena, check out the newest translation of The Odyssey by Emily Wilson, whose lucid language is wonder-full. Athena is everywhere.

[i] Walter Otto, The Homeric Gods, 55

[ii] Ibid, 60

Flow. Fluid ease. Softer vision. Pisces says there’s no need to hang onto those things that have accumulated onto our nerves, under our skin, hardened around our heart. Letting go is a part of the Pisces way. So here we are, in a time where we are supported in letting go, just a bit, of whatever we’ve been clutching onto…

In mindfulness meditation we’re taught that rather than trying to focus on not thinking, we soften to the space around us and simply allow any sounds in the room to wash over and through us. A mindful presence where we are neither grasping at ‘inner silence’ nor defending ourselves from the world. This kind of allowing is Pisces territory.

Now presence, the capacity for deep awareness, does not belong to any one sign though each will express it in a very particular way. For Pisces consciousness, presence means being open to the inner world in relation to outer experience. Connection, flow. Two fishes eternally swimming alongside one another.

This playlist is a prayer to Pisces. Whether instrumental or lyric laden, each piece gives expression to some kind of release. It is a supplication for grace. May we each find an opening into the mystic and be renewed therein.

When a planet enters a new sign it takes on the qualities and interests of that sign. It can be understood as a kind of archetypal renewal that gives rise to origin stories, carrying sparks of insight that unfold throughout the planet’s passage of the sign. These principles have been at work as October cradled Jupiter’s annual move into a new sign, Scorpio (October 10th).

On the edge of Jupiter’s ingress into Scorpio, on the morning of October 5th Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment story was published in the New York Times [i]. Over the following days more actresses came forward to speak of their experiences of Weinstein’s predatory behavior.

On the heels of this story came the social media hashtag #MeToo that women are using to self-identify as victims of sexual harassment and making consciousness [ii]. Scrolling down the #MeToo page my heart ached and I wanted to hug each woman, look her in the eye and say, “I know, me too”.

The widespread culture of male abuse of power and serial sexual misconduct and abuse has been outed. It’s as if there has been a groundswell that has required each previous egregious perpetrator [iii]to get to this level of visibility. Following quickly on the Weinstein story, the California state capital legislators, aides and lobbyists came forward to denounce sexual harassment in the legislature (October 17th). On the same day, the New York Times headlined an article about the Nxivm cult where women are branded and called ‘slaves’ [iv].

The stories continue. Actors, comedians, journalists, executives, and or course, politicians.

There is an astrological correspondence or coincidence of Jupiter moving into Scorpio and the exposing of these issues of power and sex in our culture. These stories of sexual harassment may be understood as the opening gambit of Jupiter in Scorpio.

Astrological Openings and Insights

Scorpio has to do with the taboo subjects of power, sex and shared resources (other people’s money and how we use it).

Jupiter is the planetary archetype related to the principles of expansion, growth, increase. Jupiter magnifies and illumines. When things grow, they become more obvious. Jupiter in Scorpio exposes what has been hidden. The shadow of male power has been outed.

As Jia Tolentino expressed it, “For years—for centuries—the economic, physical, and cultural subjugation of women has registered as something like white noise. Lately, it appears that we’re starting to hear the tune. What has been a backdrop is now in the foreground” [v].

Jupiter is a collective planet showing something of our connection to the larger whole. So we are dealing here with a culture-wide issue of male power and its abuses, its limits, its privileges.

The medicine is given with the wound. Astrological symbolism reveals to us the homeopathic treatment. Jupiter seeks an expansion of awareness, shining a light on what has been under wraps and needs to develop.  This awareness needs the full spectrum of Scorpio vision, which is introspection, Scorpio’s signature super-power.

This coincidence of characteristics suggests a meditation on what is brought to awareness. This was made evident to me this past Sunday morning while I was reading the New York Times and I came across a full broadsheet ad by the men’s shaving needs company Harry’s.

The bottom reads:

In other words, there needs to be some soul-searching.

We women and men also need the positive masculine quality of discernment as we explore these issues of male power and sex. As described above, Jupiter inflates and expands, so we must be careful of how things can get lumped together. There needs to be discussion about the levels of sexual harassment, perpetrators and the appropriate consequences for their actions. There is a certain ethical and moral threshold to meet if you are to be a public figure, but so too if you’re simply a part of a community, whether professional, social or private. One-size will not fit all. Our anger and outrage is a right response, and its natural that there is discomfort in these discussions. But we have to keep one eye on the Jupiterian proclivity to ignore distinctions in favor for large sweeping generalities. Part of this will be developing a discernment about boundaries, which is also Scorpio territory.  

We are in another stage of an elimination process of the old patriarchal paradigm, and when the old is cut loose then can come restoration. But we have to mid-wife that renewal through our deepening sense of integrity and a courage for introspection to face what needs to be brought into consciousness.

October and the trees are stripped bare

Of all they wear.

What do I care?

October and kingdoms rise

And kingdoms fall

But you go on

And on.

U2 “October”

[i] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/harvey-weinstein-harassment-allegations.html

[ii] Following the trail of these two simple words I have learned that #MeToo was created by Tarana Burke in the late 90s.

[iii] Most notable last year: Donald Trump and Bill Cosby

[iv] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/17/nyregion/nxivm-women-branded-albany.html

[v] Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker Oct. 30, 2017 “Limits of Power”

This book gathers Jung’s thoughts on astrology in a single volume for the first time. My co-editor and colleague Keiron Le Grice and I selected the writings from Jung’s Collected Works, seminars, and letters, which contain numerous discussions of this ancient divinatory system.

Understood as a symbolic representation of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, Jung found in astrology a wealth of spiritual and psychological meaning, for it represents the “sum of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity.”

Topics treated include the archetypal symbolism in astrology, the precession of the equinoxes and astrological ages, astrology as a form of synchronicity and acausal correspondence, the qualitative nature of time, and the experience of astrological fate—allowing readers to assess astrology’s place within the larger corpus of Jung’s work and its value as a source of symbolic meaning.

The origin story of this book began a decade ago when I went to a small seminar given by Richard Tarnas on archetypal astrology. Listening to how he approached the planets as gods and their meaningful correspondence to life (both inner and outer), I was honestly thunderstruck. I always appreciated astrology and had studied it casually, but Tarnas’ approach rooted in Jung and the psyche was something I had never heard before. I realized that astrology could combine mythology, Jung’s psychology and an understanding of the archetypal ground of life. Astrology put into practice a perspective on life that Jung developed in his work. Everything I had been studying from high school through to graduate school moved out of the more scholarly place and into a psychological and spiritual practice. Astrology could be reimagined as a soul practice.

Over the years of much deeper study, I was surprised to find that while many astrologers who are psychologically oriented are attuned to Jungian psychology, but there was no book on Jung’s own writings on astrology. So in early 2015 I approached my colleague Keiron Le Grice about compiling just such a book for the “Jung On” series. Keiron has studied astrology for 25 years and has written two books on archetypal astrology, and I felt that together we could pull this project off. And we did. The Jung family gave us their permission to use all of Jung’s relevant published material, and we are grateful for their generosity.

I hope you will enjoy this book as much as we did putting it together. You might consider approaching this volume as if you were a sea-diving bird, dipping in and out where you please, rather than reading from cover to cover. Jung on Astrology is available on Amazon.

With joy,

Safron

“Men are not free when they’re doing just what they like.
Men are only free when they’re doing what the deepest self likes.
And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.”

It’s been an odd summer. On the one hand there’s been nothing but doing, with two writing projects underway (more news on one of them shortly), teaching and moving house, I’ve been busy like the bees. And it seems like everyone I know has multiple projects going, big life events unfolding. On the other hand, there has also been the reflective questioning about what lies behind things – the wherefore and why of all the activity.

A client shared how burned out she’s been by her huge list of commitments and projects. The issue was not necessarily all she had to do so much as that her guiding vision has become diffuse, unclear.

The incongruity between action and deeper motivation didn’t make a lot of sense to me until I realized that Mars was at the very end of his cycle. Symbolic of the raw energy of being, Mars is about how we assert ourselves and affirm our identity through action.  In his waning phase It’s like our desire-drive slows down, despite everything we’ve got going on. But we know that when a cycle ends that means a new one is about to begin, imminent renewal.

A New Mars

Mars’ renewal occurred a few days ago on July 26th, which happens to have been Jung’s birthday. Meeting up with the Sun in Leo, this marked the start of Mars’ synodic cycle, which will unfold over the next 22 or so months. While Mars will move through the entire zodiac (retrograding in Aquarius next June), Leo is the seed-tone[1] for this cycle.

Mars in Leo is a brilliant ruby. Images of Amazon warriors and solar heroes on divine missions -Mars in Leo strives toward the treasure knowing it is their destiny to find it. Entwined with the Sun, this Mars is about action in service of essence. It’s honoring the call of the heart. Imagine Mars as the fighting principle of the Sun – our Mars should be in service to our individual purpose, our light.

Diving

Every celestial event is an invitation for reflection upon the nature of those principles in our lives. So with Mars one goes deep: what is the nature of your desire? How is your potency and power being affirmed? How would you personify the solar warrior?

Each archetypal principle is a way of seeing the world, the gods form our subjective vision. With Mars as our guide we feel invigorated, energized, turned on by life. As John Elderidge says, “We are desire. It is the essence of the human soul, the secret of our existence. Absolutely nothing of human greatness is ever accomplished without it. Not a symphony has been written, a mountain climbed, an injustice fought, or a love sustained apart from desire. Desire fuels our search for the life we prize.”

We each have a distinct relationship to Mars’ cycle. For some of us our Mars return is linked with this time and with it a rising energy and clarity. For others, you may be in the ‘full moon’ phase with Mars, a crisis period --- crisis meaning opportunity. For those in the waning phase, it is a time to take stock and prepare the way for the new.

Where are you in the map of your desire?

[1] See Dane Rudhyar’s The Lunation Cycle for more on the nature and developmental arc of cycles.

Every year Summer Solstice marks the Sun’s ingress into Cancer, the lunar water sign. The Cancer new moon is on Friday the 23rd, and Mercury and Mars are also moving through this sign for the next few weeks. This is a period where the imaginative resources, emotional subjectivity and self-reflective capacity of Cancer is ripe. Take the time to open these channels.

At the same time the Sun moves through the zodiac, it is transiting the houses of our birth chart. We too are living the seasonal changes. Different concerns rise to the surface, and we find ourselves focused on varying aspects of our lives and situations, both inner and outer. It is very revealing to track the Sun’s movement through your chart, for it shows the larger seasonal frame of your life.

To stir the possibilities of the Cancer season I offer a short piece on the element of water and the soul. This is an excerpt from a presentation I gave at the Dallas Institute of Humanities & Culture James Hillman 2016 Symposium in October, titled “Cosmologies of Soul: Astrology and Alchemy”.

“Moisture makes the soul succumb to joy”.[1] To say that the soul loves moisture means it loves feeling and flow. Emotion, reverie and reflection, the soul’s proclivities, are imagined in watery ways. Astrologically, our capacity and style of reflection is related to the Moon. And her sign Cancer carries the elemental awareness of her archetypal flow. Luna, goddess of the waters, rules the fourth house of self-reflection, personal unconscious, home, mother, and endings.

An alchemical rule: ‘perform no operation until all has become water’ means that not until emotion permeates everything is one to act. James Hillman amplifies, “Rational analysis must wait for emotion to flow, reveries to float, collect in pools, stir, sink, find outlets”.[2] When the matter (the issue, the complex, the hardness) begins to find movement and “melts into indiscriminate fluidity”[3] then something is happening.  What has become fixed, habitual, literal, then starts to dissolve and take a softer shape.

Water is an elemental medium of the soul. It is the dream element, moist and moving, animated and flowing. “Dreaming is a nightly dip, a skinny dip, into the pool of images and feelings…Dreams solve problems because all dreams are wet: they dissolve the mental constraints of the day world in the flow of imagination”.[4] Tension knots, hard edges, stony complexes, sureties impoverished of imagination, water finds purchase in the tiniest of fissures and beings to flow. And as aqua vitae, water has the power to revivify what has become dry and calcinated.  The soul stirs things back to life by moistening.  

So this may be a time of paying attention to the background flow of feeling and allowing things to deepen. Bringing the moist element into life includes paying attention to the flow of thoughts and intimations, as well as dream images.

[1] Heraclitus. (2001). Fragments: The collected wisdom of Heraclitus. (B. Haxton, Trans.). New York, NY: Viking. p. 47.

[2] Hillman, J. (2010). Alchemical psychology. James Hillman uniform edition (Vol. 5). Thompson, CT: Spring Publications. p. 42.

[3] Ibid, p. 248

[4] Hillman, J. (1986). “Souls Take Pleasure in Moisture”. In R. Sardello and A. Thomas (Eds.), Stirrings of Culture (203-205). Dallas: The Dallas Institute Publications. p. 203.