planet

An Aries individual is a self-starter.  He is “cardinal-fire” and is totally dependent on his own self-motivational creative energies.  When he is not in touch with this “engine”, he has no power.  He then becomes a lamb rather than a ram.  The potency of the will is practically non-existent.  The totally personality-centered Aries is usually unconscious about his urge to project his need for response to his desire nature.  He initiates, but the force is immediate at best, without the objective awareness required to be able to see where his initiatory fires will lead and the nature of the responses they will provoke.  Everything is based on a “me-first” attitude.  This does not make for a “bad” person as much as it does for one who is rather naïve and unaware of others and his surrounding environment.

Mercury retrograde: Mercury is the toasty planet whirling so close to the Sun that it never appears farther than one sign away. Mercury has 4.15 years, or rotations around the Sun, to each earth year.  Because we’re moving in the same direction, although slower, Mercury appears to rotate around the Sun only three times a year; it can move up to 28° ahead of the Sun as an evening star, then starts to circle back on its orbit and looks, from our Earthly perspective, to move backwards or turn retrograde against the pattern of the Zodiac behind it for about three weeks. (see http://astro.unl.edu/classaction/animations/renaissance/retrograde.html )

When it does, we get a chance to come to a new and deeper understanding, reconnect with our past and bring work to completion, do anything that begins re-, like remember, re-edit, reconnect, retreat, reorganize, but all that Mercury stands for may not work quite like we hope. Mercury retrograde can really snafu business as usual, but it is loaded with its own gifts if we take the time and dance with it well.

Mercury likes to move, so the day at the beginning and end of this retrograde cycle -when Mercury appears to hold still -are the trickiest; so much hold still here on earth.  Mercury disappears into the Sun’s light and reappears on the other side more often than any other visible planet—one reason it corresponds to the magician and the shape-shifter archetypes in mythology.

Mercury: In Greek mythology, Mercury was the God of the crossroads, the messenger of the Gods and the psychopomp that went down to the underworld to negotiate for the release of lost souls. He was also God of thieves; he symbolizes an ingenious quality that is a gift when in the service of the Gods but a source of trouble when used to disconnect us from heart and body or for personal gain.

Excerpt from Chapter 5 of Astrology and the Authentic Self by Demetra George

Now that you have delineated the Ascendant and its ruler, you have a sense of what core drive motivates the soul to action, what planet and house guide the person to his or her destination as the purpose of the life incarnation, and to what extent this will be a successful journey. Next, we will investigate just what this purpose is and how it can be expressed in the daily life. For these answers, we turn to the Sun and the Moon.

Hellenistic astrologers called the Sun and the Moon “the rulers of one’s all,” and described them as having authority over the whole life.¹ Of the seven visible planets known to the ancients, the Sun is the largest body and the Moon is the smallest. Yet, by some exquisite piece of geometry and proportion, at the moment when the Full Moon rises in the east, just as the Sun sets in the west, they appear to be the same size from the perspective of Earth. Together, the Sun and Moon regulate the cycle of day and night, wake and sleep, activity and rest—a tempo that moves us through the days and months and years of our lives.

What distinguishes the Sun from the other planetary bodies in the horoscope is that it is a star. The nature and composition of a star, an enormous generator of fiery energy, is different from that of a planet. In fact, since the ultimate energy source for most of the biological processes on Earth is sunlight, the ancients were not mistaken in their worship of the Sun as the fount of life. Plato thought the stars were a more divine order of celestial entities than the planets, because they moved with a regularity quite different from the erratic movements of the planets. Today we know that the Sun is the center of our solar system; all the other planets revolve around it. As such, it can be said to be the center or heart of our being, around which all other astrological factors constellate.

In the mysterious cosmic energies that swirl around our planet, there appears a magnificently potent pattern that anchors the consciousness of humanity. Huge, two-thousand-year-long configurations encoded with the language of unfolding awareness guard our globe like benevolent sentries, opening portals that usher us into the unexplored territory that goes far beyond the present definition of what it is to be human.