spock
Well-known member
If you're contrasting the actual cause of Spring (the pole of the hemisphere in question tilting neither towards nor away from the Sun following a period when it was tilted away from it) with something (Venus on the horizon) that merely evokes the idea of it I'd say we're on the same page. So yes.
Exactly. Life has used the Sun, Moon and planets as a means of organizing its processes in time. A corollary is that it's illogical (and lacking in evidentiary support) to have charts for events, nations, ingresses, returns, or relationships, none of which is a biological entity.
That was pretty much my own starting point. What am I like according to astrology? What about attraction and a relationship between me and another person? At the time I formulated some crude ideas about synastry and followed Grant Lewi (Heaven Knows What) in my understanding of the natal chart, but I didn't feel I knew enough about how astrology works to know for sure how to apply it specific situations. So I took a long detour. That detour turned out to be a fascinating end in itself, a quest for a certain kind of knowledge, but those basic questions -- what can astrology tell me about myself? what can astrology tell me about where I'm going? what can astrology tell me about compatibility between myself and others? -- are the motives underlying that quest.
The crude ideas I referred to are as follows. One, having similar aspects, the idea being that we can best relate to someone who is, in important ways, like us. My ex, who was a skilled press operator, was very straigtforward and untactful in human relations, a quality I related to Mercury conjunct Uranus in her chart. At new jobs she would invariably have a blow-up with an equally straightforward press operator already there, after which they'd be great friends because they understood each other. I don't know if her printing press co-workers generally had the same or similar Uranus aspects, but I suspect they did. What constitutes similar aspects, when it's not the same planets and aspect, is an open question. Sun/Uranus and Mars/Uranus, for instance? And does the aspect between them, for instance square or trine, have to be the same?
Two, having complementary aspects, which I related mostly to Venus and Mars and to a lesser extent to Moon and Sun. A person with Venus conjunct Saturn, for instance, would be attracted to profundity and conscientiousness, and a person with Mars conjunct Saturn would embody or express these qualities. The way I thought about it was Venus likes the way Mars does it, with Venus aspects indicating what we're receptive to (in males or females), and Mars aspects indicating our style, the way we come across. What I liked about this was it could account for lack of symmetry in interactions. We're not always attracted to people who are attracted to us and vice versa.
Third, there is of course interaspects, which I've understood in terms of timing (anticipating my subsequent approach to natal aspects, about which more later). If she has Mars conjunct his Venus, for example, this means everytime Saturn transits conjunct, square or opposite her Mars it will simultaneously transit conjunct, square, or opposite his Venus. Their lives are in sync. They experience turning points at the same time, which I think might be a prerequisite for having a relationship. It also enables me to account for the fact that an attraction now might be a repulsion five, ten, or twenty years from now, even though their charts and supposedly the attraction they indicate haven't changed. If synastry simply indicates attraction how does it account for break-ups? I decided that interaspects most likely signal that the people involved can have an impact on each other. If they weren't going through change periods at the same time (inlcuding, of course, the change period for each that coincided with their marriage and/or the beginning of their relationship) they'd pass by each other like ships in the night, never making contact. But the changes each experiences (due largely to choices made) during subsequent simultaneous transits will pull them closer together or push them apart. Usually there are several interaspects indicating several levels of change. The initial impetus for a relationship will often involve simultaneous Mars transits, and if the relationship survives only two years, or one-quarter, half, or three-quarters of a Mars cycle, that suggests the relationship was never more than a physical relationship, a love affair. There is often a Jupiter component, indicating the companionship aspect of the relationship, their liking to do things together. Jupiter transits time new enthusiasms (including for astrologers the first exciting exposure to the subject), hobbies and friendships (and by the same token often the termination of old ones). And there is usually a Saturn component, the level at which the couple is a unit of and contributor to society, which tends to lead to a formally sanctioned relationship (i.e. legal marriage) with expectations about the role(s) in the relationship each plays (often a source of dissatisfaction which comes to a head during subsequent Saturn transits). Transits at each of these levels can strain or strengthen that level of the relationship. (Of course it's not the transit per se that does this but rather our response to the mindset that comes to the forefront at regular intervals.)
Except for sextiles those are the aspects I use in the natal chart. I use only the hard-angle aspects, the conjunction, square and opposition, for transit work. I do think associating the opposition, for instance, with "the . . . opposite way" is a little pat albeit perhaps not totally irrelevant and at any rate not inconsistent with what you'd have been exposed to in learning astrology. But ultimately, and I've tried to do this as much as possible, it's better to collect examples of oppositions and conjunctions and squares and see how they're different rather than going by the words themselves. But since you don't present yourself as a researcher (although I like your mentality) it would be unfair to expect you to have done something like that.
I don't think signs or elements (or houses) have any meaning at all. Fire, earth, water and air are medieval concepts of elements that have long since been abandoned by the modern world, yet astrologers still use them mostly, so far as I can tell, because we're used to them and don't usually think about the implications of our beliefs. I think most astrological techniques and factors are invalid, although there's a reason astrologers have so many of them which I'll talk about in my response to dr. farr.
Yes, you got it right as far as what I think astrology is about, albeit I'm also concerned with methodological issues: how we know what we think we know and the means by which we can create a more valid astrology.
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They start at birth. To save time and avoid reinventing the wheel I'm going lift the subsection "Transit Patterns and the Evolution of Personality" from my article, with some minor editing. If I've left questions unanswered or you have additional ones let me know.
Change in the individual can also be seen as a source of personality, those relatively stable attributes by which we differentiate one person from another in terms of what each is like. If a given configuration says something about what the person who has it is like, what's the connection between that configuration and that fact? How did the person come to be that way? For instance, I have Saturn and Mars at 24°53' and 27°06' Cancer, respectively. What does this mean? It means everytime Mars transits conjunct, square, or opposite its natal place it also transits conjunct, square, or opposite natal Saturn. During Mars/Mars hard-angle transits matters tend to come to a head with regards to our daily routine, including not only what we do throughout a normal day but also who we interact with. (We often initiate or terminate personal relationships, including love affairs, during Mars/Mars hard-angle transits.) But we don't experience an obvious external event during every transit. The actual predictable "event" appears to be a kind of restlessness, which is itself indicative of a part of the psyche being temporarily in the forefront of consciousness, thereby making us aware of whatever latent dissatisfactions we have. This awareness of discontent sometimes rises to the level that we feel we have to do something about it. In developmental terms, the first Mars Return (22-23 months) coincides with the transition, in the Piagetian system, from the sensorimotor to the preoperational period. This is when we "get it" about how names apply to things. This and other developments suggest a motivational "force" that is itself the same during all Mars/Mars transits, regardless of age, albeit the life outcomes differ.
My account of Mars/Saturn transits will be sketchier and less certain. It essentially times a period of inhibition during which we're more than usually aware, but not necesssarily in a fully conscious sense, of the consequences, particularly the social consequences, of whatever we're thinking about doing. In a sense we manage to bring those consequences down upon our heads, a kind of what-I-have-feared-has-come-upon-me situation. Grant Lewi viewed the squares and the opposition in the Saturn/Mars cycle as periods when we're likely to meet disaster if we push our luck too far, and the same might apply to Mars/Saturn.
Now imagine the developmental consequences of always having the turning points in these two rhythms coincide. Everytime I feel the urge during a Mars/Mars transit to resolve issues that have been bothering me, that I now can't ignore, a simultaneous Mars/Saturn transit is causing me to feel inhibited, which presumably not only keeps me from doing some things but even more likely gives a characteristic shape or psychological spin to what I actually end up doing. Year after year, transit after transit, a set of propensities, a personality pattern, builds up. Dealing with the same issues won't necessarily cause people with the same aspect (and pattern of simultaneous transits) to develop the same specific behaviors, but their characteristic responses to situations, even though different, stem from the same recurrent psychological challenges. Behind different coping behaviors we may find the same thing being coped with, for instance an exaggerated fear of humiliation. One person might cope with such a fear by being evasive and hard to pin down, so that he can never be shown to have been wrong, whereas another might go to exaggerated lengths to eliminate errors, to avoid being wrong.
By noting the timing patterns natal relationships imply, we can use transit dynamics to make sense of the natal chart. Rather than expecting a Mars conjunct Saturn or a Jupiter square Sun to magically confer the qualities we associate with it, we can see those qualities developing over time via the patterns of simultaneity resulting from that particular natal setup. The natal chart has other timing implications as well. If, for instance, Saturn and Uranus cross the Ascendant (ie. square the Ng) together at age 25 in a given person's life, it means that at birth they were the right distances from each other and from the ASC to arrive together at it at age 25. There are many such timing statements in the natal chart.
Did my earlier coments on synastry answer this question?
Hope you found them helpful.
p.s. As an example of the compatibility ideas I enunciated above I notice, if I'm not mistaken, that you have Sun conjunct Saturn and your husband has Venus conjunct Saturn. The latter can be a control freak, due to emotional and material insecurity. The former tends to feel obligated.
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