kaali and Flapjacks,
Both of you, I'm very thankful for your recent posts on this thread, and I wanted to respond.
I'm trying to establish for myself a kind of ratio rule where I post at least about 5 or 6 posts on other people's charts or interesting ideas in their own right to every 1 post I make selfishly about my own chart. And I think I'm due an indulgant post
It looks like you were born a few weeks after my boyfriend. I couldn't help but think of him while reading this post in particular, and this was before I looked at your chart!
Flapjacks, your boyfriend sounds like somebody I'd like to meet someday. I was fascinated to read everything you said about him... it sounds like we're absorbed in very similar themes/conundrums in life. If ever he's tempted to be astro-analyzed by a bunch of random strangers on a public internet forum (who wouldn't!
) I'd love to see his natal chart.
kaali said:
personally I think sextiles are more interesting than trines since they integrate different elements, but you have lots of both and the outer planets were working in harmony to connect them. Plus that T square isn't so bad... I'm curious though what it's like having Pisces mercury as your only water planet. Both your Asc and MC are ruled by Mercury conjunct your Dsc, which is co-ruled by Neptune on your IC, so that's quite an interesting pattern!
It is interesting the Neptune on IC with an Aries stellium -- Aries having defined itself after the sign of Pisces dissolves itself. It sort of gives a "phoenix from the ashes" vibe. Capricorn is like an "evolved" Aries in the sense that it takes the lessons to the next level. Your NN there and your Saturn in 10th, 10th ruled by Mercury (Lord of Chart and on angle), seem to say that you'll achieve whatever you are after, to me. It goes back to that 4th house... the "roots", where Neptune lives and where there are beginnings and ends that perhaps don't have the usual boundaries. At least, that's getting flowery with it.
So here comes the indulgence. You both said a few quick things that are very insightful about my chart, I think, and very interesting to me.
If I initially got interested in astrology at a very early age, I dropped it for a long decade there as I focused on academic studies and my career. So when I came onto this site about six months ago I thought I knew a thing or two about my own chart but wanted to go deeper, and quickly discover just how little I knew and how much deeper I really had to go. Since then I've picked up a lot and think I've already come a long way, but really I'm only now in the process of digging beyond a beginner's read.
So let me respond to these two things you've said - kaali on Mercury in Pisces and Flapjacks on Aries in the 8th - because they've both struck a major chord with me.
In my very first thread on this site I was (rightly) chastised by greybeard for not looking at the whole chart in concert and since then I've been paying a lot of attention to way the planets combine to make a symphony.
What I'm seeing right now in my own chart are essentially two grand patterns, superimposed upon each other.
The first pattern is essentially five points in a six-pointed-star formation. Excluding Mercury, all the planets in my chart are in Yang signs (covering all the Yang signs but Leo). And if we exclude Uranus for a moment, all those planets run through the Yang Zodiac, from Libra to Gemini, making trines and sextiles. I've even noticed that they actually go in an order where the degrees are ascending (Pluto at 2 degrees, Neptune and the Mars/Jupiter conj. around 7 degrees, Aries Stuff between 6 and 14 degrees, Saturn at 15). And amidst all that uranus isn't quite left out. he makes a wide orbed trine to Saturn after all.
So that seems lovely and really very harmonious.
But then this one planet comes in - Mercury - and creates a whole other pattern. Mercury on the Descendent winds up highlighting the angular cross, I think, slashing right through that almost-a-star pattern. I wind up with this angular T-square which this thread has graciously been discussing, and of course Mercury is Virgo's ruler so it's working with the Asc. In fact, as you already clearly see, kaali, there's a deep association going on here. Asc and MC are in Virgo and Gemini respectively (with Saturn close to MC), which brings us to Mercury. Mercury is in Pisces which bring us to Neptune. And Neptune is on the IC. Tight knit.
So the "one water planet" situation is interesting to me. With Virgo Asc and five planets across all three air signs, I should be Mr. Spock. But I'm very much not. Now, I have the capacity for serious analytic and logic power - even though I don't value it as much as the circles I travel in do. (I think it has an important place, but I've learned that against natural instincts not to value it.) But my clear natural tendency is to feel, and to think synthetically and musically. I naturally go with my feelings and intuitions over my thoughts and logic - and my intuitions and feelings are usually faster and more correct than my logic is anyway. I naturally see things synthetically - bound together as wholes - rather than analytically - the relationships between component pieces. I started life as a musician. That was my first attempt at something like a career. I was very good at it and my musical expression was a raw pouring out of emotion. It was not the controlled, disciplined expression of a classical cellist. It was intuitive and entirely emotive - and the music of the time. But from the moment I popped out of the womb it was pretty clear I was going to be a thinker. My mother used to call me her little professor. And so my life's journey took me away from music and towards academia. But amongst academics I'm different. I stress feeling in my work in a way most academics push against, for example. And Here I am on an astrology forum. Etc.
So only now, building a deeper understanding of this chart, can I start to explain this to myself. It must be that this one planet in water winds up exerting a huge influence on me - and may explain why I have more tendencies associated with water than I should have:
1) Mercury rules the chart, but winds up in Pisces, and right there I think that manifests as an effort across my life to balance analysis and synthesis, logic and feeling.
2) Mercury deposits into Neptune, and that ties back to everything on this thread. I think now that everything my heart and mind is doing comes back to Neptune. And that's exactly the kind of thing I wouldn't have sen with a beginner's read of the chart. I would have just thought, "one water planet, I guess I'm not supposed to feel much" and then walked away without giving astrology much credit because it doesn't actually fit my experiences with my own self.
3) But, my journey has been one of moving away from being dominated by Neptune and moving towards the intellectual discipline of Saturn in Gemini (near the MC). From musician to professor. From feeler to disciplined feeler/thinker. Which is why I'm so interested in what Kannon said earlier in this thread about the point of the life to be to move from the IC to the MC. If that's true that would explain a lot to me.
Finally on this point, kaali, I wonder if your Neptune on the Descendent has a similar effect as my Mercury in Pisces does in regards to empathy. I've begun to decide, after reading and listening to people on this sight, that both Libra and the 7th house have to do with a kind of intellectual empathy - where we imaginatively
see into the perspectives and experiences of others. While Neptune and Pisces has to do with the more emotional empathy, where we
feel the feelings of others, feel for others, and even feel as though we are losing our ego boundaries and becoming one with others. Empathy is something that comes all too naturally to me and I've even had to learn some Saturnian boundary-making in life. I wonder how it is with you? Neptune in Cap (and Saturn there too, right?) might make for a different and more interesting dynamic than mine. But I'd like to hear abotu how you experience empathy in your life, kaali... (If that's o.k. to share...)
And now that I've gone overboard and written too much (surprise surprise), I just want to come back to Flapjacks and say of the "phoenix out of the ashes" vibe that no astrologer has said that to me yet, and yet I think that's
exactly right. I have read that Plutonic people will experience "chapters" in their life, sharp break after sharp break, that are very obvious (not just internal) and transformative like a snake molding its skin. I don;t like to think of myself as a "Plutonic" person, but until the last decade I did a lot of skin-molting. A number of sharp, immediate, revolutionary breaks where everything changed and I had to emerge renewed out of little deaths. It's a theme. The "radical restructuring of the whole life" thing has thankfully seemed to calm down with age, but to my great shock and surprise I started to undergo one of these transformations at an inner level last year, and I'm still going through it. I thought they were over, but I recognized it once it started happening again.
But I really appreciate that you note the Aries as the "phoenix" part of this. I see that this may very well be colored by the way Aries and Scorpio energy are closely knit in my chart (Pluto in first house, Aries stuff in 8th) but I do tend to see Aries, like you suggest, as the Resurrection (with all its spiritual connotations) after Pisces dissolves the ego into the universe...
As for your final comments on Aries moving to Capricorn, Flapjacks, I have to stay silent on that here, exactly because it's
too big to launch into. You've struck
the topic I think I'm dealing with right now. Figuring out the right direction my personal evolution is supposed to take... You've already located it in my chart, in ways I've been struggled to understand for decades...!
Thanks both of you for wonderful comments and for indulging me in these things about my own chart that obviously I'm excited to share with astro-minded people.
I really like to read what you have to say in general. You are very kind and considerate, so don't feel like you are being selfish here! 
"
" This would most definitely improve how we communicate intentions on this forum.