Toward The One By Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan

How to read your own Birth Chart

Concerning the confusion about what it means to have a planet in a house etc, I made a step-by-step guide on how to read the placements in your chart. I hope this helps.

http://www.astrologymarina.com/2015/06/how-to-read-your-own-birth-chart.html

Mars/Venus: Instincts + Attraction

Your rising sign can be used in addition to your Mars sign (and house placement), as Mars rules the first house. These represent an archetype you often find yourself gravitating towards whether it be situations or people who embody these themes, you also tend to embody them yourself.

I am instinctively drawn towards…

Mars in Aries: Freedom, action, adventure, self discovery. Mars in Taurus: Security, nature, beauty, leisure, whatever reflects my values. Mars in Gemini: Variety, wit, communication, language, facts, intellectualism. Mars in Cancer: Nurturing, being nurtured, nostalgia, comfort, home. Mars in Leo: Self-expression, theatricality, glamour, romance, fun. Mars in Virgo: Self-improvement, analysis, humility, perfectionism. Mars in Libra: Relationships, aesthetics, diplomacy, sophistication, fantasy. Mars in Scorpio: Intensity, power, sex, the morbid, hidden or occult. Mars in Sagittarius: Truth, philosophy, religion, other cultures, academia. Mars in Capricorn: Wisdom, discipline, social status, authority. Mars in Aquarius: Genius, science, groups, rebellion, the unconventional. Mars in Pisces: Spirituality, sacrifice, sensitivity, isolation, escapism.

Your descendant and 2nd house can be used in addition to your Venus sign and house placement, as Venus rules both the 2nd and 7th house. The Taurus or 2nd house side of Venus represents an archetype you value while the Libra/7th house side represents what you often attract into your life through others.

I tend to value or attract people who are…

Venus in Aries: Invigorating, courageous, competitive, selfish, bullying, naive. Venus in Taurus: Dependable, artistic, beautiful, stubborn, possessive, greedy. Venus in Gemini: Clever, talkative, curious, intellectual, immature, dishonest. Venus in Cancer: Nurturing, gentle, domestic, needy, moody, irrational. Venus in Leo: Confident, fun, creative, romantic, egotistical, attention-seeking. Venus in Virgo: Health-conscious, helpful, analytical, humble, critical, anxious. Venus in Libra: Polite, charming, elegant, flaky, co-dependent, unstable. Venus in Scorpio: Powerful, perceptive, deep, manipulative, destructive. Venus in Sagittarius: Profound, cultured, optimistic, arrogant, blunt, foolish. Venus in Capricorn: Ambitious, disciplined, wise, repressed, intolerant. Venus in Aquarius: Friendly, unique, rebellious, detached, unpredictable. Venus in Pisces: Compassionate, poetic, imaginative, lacking boundaries, delusional, fragile.

Shared traits between the neighbouring signs: Pisces/Aries – Innocence Aries/Taurus – Persistence Taurus/Gemini – Productivity Gemini/Cancer – Curiosity Cancer/Leo – Loyalty Leo/Virgo – Particularity Virgo/Libra – Sociability Libra/Scorpio – Magnetism Scorpio/Sagittarius – Passion Sagittarius/Capricorn – Endurance Capricorn/Aquarius – Ambition Aquarius/Pisces – Solidarity

Misunderstood Houses

I’ve been thinking about the houses lately, and I think we tend to get a little stuck in buzzwords and as a result, we can struggle with the concepts. Here are some of my concepts of the houses I think this happens with the most.

6th house: To me, this is the house of healing. Buzzwords often thrown around for this house include: service, daily work, habits, health, pets, organization. I think the common thread here is what heals or is healthy to you, and how you seek to heal others. What you do every day has the biggest impact on your health, and so it lives in the 6th house. Acts of service heal others, and so they live in the 6th house. Transits through the 6th house may affect your health, but they may also affect the healing energy you bring to others, or simply an aspect of the systems that keep you healthy.

8th house: This is the house of transformations, the house of things that break you and remake you.This is a house we don’t like to show others, because it contains the parts of our lives that are direct lines to our souls. This house is often said to rule over money, sex, death, secrets, addiction, etc. These are the things that have the ability to crush us, or turn us into completely different people. “Occult” things are often placed in this house as well, but I think a more accurate word would be “faith” or “religion” because these have the ability to penetrate to our souls. Placements and transits through the 8th house don’t necessarily mean we will be transformed, but that the things that have the ability to transform us will be affected. 

10th house: This house is often associated with careers, and that’s not exactly wrong, but I think its fundamental concept is a bit broader. This is the house of your life’s work. What are your ambitions? What will you seek recognition in? What do you want to accomplish in your life? Your inclinations are shown here. It’s true that the concept of life’s work often aligns with someone’s career, but astrology predates capitalism and you don’t have to make a living off it for it to be your life’s work.

The Signs: Dark Rulerships

Dark and unusual things over which each sign rules.

Aries: accidents, barren places and burned ground, cuts, doorways, insomnia, nosebleeds, skulls, surgery, thistles, trances, wolves

Taurus: coins, dogma, strangulation, gluttony, psychometry, suspect and unsafe places

Gemini: breath, pupils, rumors, chests, crystals, hounds, ribs, forgetting, pillars

Cancer: blood serum, graves, onyx, cellars, cradles, marshes, night flowers, glass, wells

Leo: fortresses and lairs, arrogance, chamomilla, ballrooms, circuses and playgrounds, vomiting

Virgo: black cats, fractured bones, libraries, intestines, conceit and inferiority, sick rooms, parasites

Libra: vines and lilies, marble, trials, alcoves and closets, vertebrae, forests, manipulation, attics

Scorpio: cesspools, bile, funerals and embalmers, magic, foul odors and stagnant water, blood red, vermin and mobs

Sagittarius: the spine, altars, visions and prophecy, incense, holy books, arteries

Capricorn: decay, abandoned places, thorns and nightshade, bones, coffins and mortuaries, gates, acid and ashes

Aquarius: ether and blood, radio static, teeth, rebellions, black pearls, nuclear weapons

Pisces: abbeys, enemies, hospitals and anesthetics, veils, outcasts and charlatans, clairvoyance, gasoline, mazes, falsity, self-undoing

why are pisces such psychopath magnets?

They truly believe they can “fix” them and allow others to take advantage of them because they can’t really see what’s going on in reality.

One thing I’ve noticed is that I’ve always been on a different “wavelength” than everyone else, like I’m an outsider observing everything even when I’m among my friends. It feels like there’s always a thin film separating me from everyone else, like I’m some sort of different species. I feel like a silent protagonist: everyone else is an NPC who knows their lines, who has their own scripts and schedules, and I’m drifting between them, and if I interact with them, I’m throwing an entire system out of whack.

The Moon 🌙

Rising quietly amidst black curtains of clouds, the Moon is the ultimate celestial representation of feminine energies on Earth and is also the yin counterpart of the Sun’s yang and radiating energy. While the Sun symbolizes our ability to identify ourselves with some kind of individual purpose and consciousness, the Moon offers us the ability to identify ourselves subjectively and unconsciously with our surroundings.

The Moon’s feminine or yin characteristics start with the basic fact that she acts as a mysterious, silvery mirror for the Sun’s confident rays. When the Moon glows in our skies, she can only do so by reflecting sunlight. This is a powerful symbol of the Moon’s receptive capabilities, which are transposed into all humans on Earth in some way or another.

For example, as children, we were very much unable to react to external stimuli at first. Emotionally, children soak in their surroundings, absorbing emotional information of what’s projected onto them and reflecting other people’s sunny lights, like the Moon does. The Moon’s placement by sign and house, then, describes one’s emotional structure, which manifests in adult life as inexplicable and repetitive emotional reactions and habits. Inexplicable, because the origins of all emotional links and identifications are long lost in the watery memory of a time when there was no emotional consciousness. Such is the reasoning behind the Moon’s correlation to the emotional realm, memories and the past. And this is also why conditions of the 4th house, analogous to Cancer, which is ruled by the Moon, symbolize one’s upbringing and emotional environment at infancy.

Conditions of the Moon and of the 4th house also correlate to one’s ability to adapt. Through the Moon’s ever-changing nature, moving rapidly around Earth and reflecting various amounts of light on her way, we discover the ability to receive and accept change, an important yin attitude that allows us a more flexible path on our way to our Sun’s final purpose. This can be easily analyzed through the modality of the sign you’re looking at, in the sense that fixed signs are much more resistant to big changes than the mutable signs, for example, which are on the other side of the spectrum.

Ruling over the sign of Cancer, the Moon also describes where one finds emotional security, mimicking the child’s need to feel protected, loved and cared for. I’ll talk more deeply on emotional security on an upcoming post on Cancer Moons.

This planet’s correlation to intuition and sensitivity can also be better understood considering the Moon’s association with childhood. Babies cannot perceive themselves as individuals with an unique force of will and an unique body. Under the weak and warm moonlight, it becomes impossible to recognize the boundaries that separate their minds from the minds of those around them, and so they become one with the world they live in; their needs become those of whoever’s around and vice-versa, until, through their relatives or guardians, they finally perceive their needs are different from anyone else’s, producing an internal Sun… Watery Moons mimic this primal mechanism through which we, as adults, may discover intuition: knowledge and information from unconscious sources hidden behind the hard structures of the material and tangible Capricorn world.

I’m hoping this helps in understanding where all those meanings come from~