torijanee,
Please please please, put your mind at ease.
Some quick synchronicity: Earlier today I was reading a book called
Measuring the Night, lectures from Steven Forrest and Jeffrey Wolf Green - two well known, very successful astrologers. Here's a quote from Green: "Let's agree that getting involved with astrology is an amazingly responsible thing to do... We all know the classic, tragic story of the person running into some astrological bookstore, buying two books, and thinking they're an astrologer. And then they start trying to work with someone's real, actual problems. And trying to talk to them after trying to read a few paragraphs in a few books."
Your friend needs to be stopped. Not from studying astrology. But from trying to read people's charts until s/he has grown a lot wiser with it. I can't imagine even beginning to try and read or council someone on their chart in any responsible way until they've at least sat with astrology for 10 or more years. Myself, I'm only beginning to feel like I can offer something responsibly to someone and I've been reading and thinking about astrology off and on for over 20 years. Others might disagree, but your post is evidence for why I feel this way. Pop astrology 101 has the power, if people allow themselves to become affected by it, to be like some unintentional black magic. Your friend might have even thought s/he was doing you a favor, but all s/he's done is persuade you into a spiral of anxiety. Iago to your Othello - again, unintentionally, I'm sure. But still...
So, really, honestly, genuinely: what your friend said doesn't warrant the anxiety. And you should let it go before the anxiety
itself becomes a problem for your relationship. If you are in a happy, stable, longterm relationship right now, why on earth wouldn't you trust the strength of your relationship over something an amateur astrologer whispers in your ear??? What's going on that the practicing of an amateur astrologer has been able to shake you're mental state so?
Which sounds like chastisement, I realize - and I don't mean it to, but I suppose I am playing the Saturn archetype here (e.g., "stern teacher"). Don't ever give that much power over your life to an astrologer, of any kind, let alone somebody who's just beginning to practice it, and probably doesn't even have a sense of what kind of astrology s/he's inclined to, his/her cosmological philosophy through which s/he reads astrology, etc. (Astrology, in fact, is a range of astrolog
ies: a broad church that allows for all sorts of approaches, philosophies, methods, beliefs and results, many of which are at odds and amount to different, competing systems...)
Right now, I'd endorse both you and your friend's continued enthusiasm for this mysterious, infuriating, elusive, blatantly metaphysical art, but recognize that you're still students, trying things out. Don't take anything you think you see in your own astrological analyses too seriously for a long time yet.
You're certainly NOT "damned to divorce" --- and if I've read the subtext of your post right and you're worried that Fate will conspire to tear you and your current love apart, then be at ease, tori. No need to fret. Whether you last with this person forever or eventually break up, neither will be determined by the fact that you have (in tropical astrology) a Gemini descendant. And don't ever let an astrologer - amateur or expert - tell you otherwise. Nobody needs to have that much magic or authority over the trajectory of your life.
Of course, nothing I've written so far offers a
reason for why the Gemini descendant doesn't doom you to divorce. So far I've just asserted that it doesn't. What's the reason? Is it that your Venus is in Pisces, as faithdjanick says above? Is it the Sun and Mars in fixed, stable signs? The Jupiter rising, in Sagittarius, lord of the chart, that, if anything, predicts a life touched by luck and happiness? Is it that your North Node is in Scorpio (another fixed sign), suggesting a deep, bonded, emotionally penetrating connection with another may be one of the very things your soul is reaching for in this life? Is it because in Vedic astrology your descendant is actually in Taurus? Is it that Gemini energy itself, while the archetype of flitter, in no way inherently damns a person to relationship instability? Is it because every symbol in the language of astrology - signs, planets, houses and aspects - are all so burdened with so many possible associations that even if we believe astrology has the power to predict it can only predict in broad ways? Is it because astrology might hint at smooth or bumpy roads ahead, but how you face those roads is up to you? Is it because our lives are all determined to some degree by forces outside of our control - our genetics, our sex, our upbringing, our economic class, the nation we're born in - but still this is a universe that affords humanity free will?
It might be any of these things. These are the sorts of decisions you will have to make as you journey down the road studying astrology, developing your own philosophy on life and reading astrology through it.
But one thing I will say. The worst kind of philosophy to approach astrology through is the sort that had you wracked when you wrote your post: the sort that sees the stars as entirely determining your Fate, and points in a natal chart like malevolent little greek gods pulling the strings of your life. Let me end with another quote from
Measuring the Night and hope I don't go over the 100 word limit on quotations:
"Most [forms of astrology] contain a big dollop of patriarchal, rigid astrology that is concerned with predicting what will happen to people. Predicting people's natures. Predicting their fates... And that kind of astrology can work like a charm...
for boring people!"
And I do not believe, torijanee, that you're a boring person.
