Click to Find It Quick! Astro Blog Feature Articles Mercury Retrograde Prashnavali Oracle Glossary Rising Sign Wizard Birth Chart Wizard Astrology Orders Daily Horoscope Weekly Horoscope Weekly LoveScope Monthly Horoscope Monthly Tarotscope Your Year Ahead AstroMatch Compatibility Sexuality by the Stars Relationships Relationship Analysis Soul Connection Your StarGuide Aries (March/April) Taurus (April/May) Gemini (May/June) Cancer (June/July) Leo (July/Aug) Virgo (Aug/Sept) Libra (Sept/Oct) Scorpio (Oct/Nov) Sagittarius (Nov/Dec) Capricorn (Dec/Jan) Aquarius (Jan/Feb) Pisces (Feb/Mar) The Horoscope Your Birthsign Astrological Signs The Elements The Houses Planets & Aspects The Zodiac Order Readings Feature Articles Science of Cosmic Oneness Mercury Retrograde Mars Retrograde Venus Retrograde Moon's Nodes Moon Wobble Zodiac Zodiac Symbols Zodiac Symbol Key Zodiac Gemstones Planets Fixed Stars Eclipse Your Rising Sign About Astrology What is Astrology? Is Astrology Scientific? Astrology & Astronomy How Astrology Works Astrology: the Sacred Art Astrology & Relationships Astrology & Health The Energy Doctor Environmental Stress The Energy Egg The Love Egg The Wealth Egg Creative Mandalas Protective Symbols Ayurveda Gemstones of the Zodiac Healing Power of Gems Hidden Magic of Gems Celtic Fire Festivals The Solstice The Equinox Easter Christmas Imbolc April Fool May Day Beltane Mothers Day Chinese New Year Valentine's Day Lady Day Midsummer St John's Day Candlemas Lammas Harvest Home Michaelmas Halloween Diwali Yule Gospel of Grandpa Old Greek Stories Numerology Numerology Cards Runes Rune Magic Feng Shui Chinese Zodiac Naadi-Shastra Yoga Human Aura Glossary Orders Site Map About Us Home Page

The Goodwill Festival [part 2]
Subtle Meanings of the Full Moon in Sagittarius

I spoke much of love in the Venus article. In Gemini we begin to see the promise of love for humanity for the first time in the zodiac. In the early stages of the Gemini experience, Mercury rules, and the person is not so much concerned with love as they are in the exploration of all the diversity of duality they find in the world and in the extreme curiosity that sort of interplay engenders.

The sex force can be very high in this type of experience as it represents the primary duality with which we are first presented in life. It is said that the sex force is the second-greatest force in human consciousness, being second only to the urge for spiritual union. Human sexuality represents the interplay of the opposites to us and the eventual bliss of union that is the natural end result. The fact that sex so often results in pain and struggle for people lies in the basic misunderstanding that sex is an act of unification, rather than of gratification. Desire holds sway much more often in sexual matters than is healthy, and if people understood that it is meant to be the natural outflowing of love between people rather than a release, then much of the misery in physically intimate relationships would be avoided and transmuted. Sexual woe is the result of the mad, monkey mind (Mercury) experience in the Gemini phase, whereas sexual union is more the Venus side of Gemini.

Spiritual Exercise

If you really want to see this relationship between spiritual union and its reflection through sexuality, then the following little exercise may be of value to you. Get a collection of lyrics from love songs – all types of love songs, no matter how grand or silly. Then read them as verse, first substituting the Soul for the desired party in the song and then reversing the roles. Do this over and over until you feel something begin to shift in your thinking. Some of this will seem really ludicrous and silly at first, but if you persist in the exercise with an open mind certain concepts begin to make themselves clear. If you know anything about the relation between the little self and the higher Self and what living a spiritual life really means, then you begin to realize that love songs, poetry and verse are all just reflections of what we most desire for ourselves in terms of our relationship with God at the most personal, inward and intimate level. Eventually desire gets transmuted to love at some point in a person’s evolution. If we read these love songs as symbols and dim reflections of something greater, then some of the mystery of human love begins to unravel and we begin to see all of our intimate relationships as a sort of journey back to ourselves – and with the added bonus of experiencing a wonderful sharing with another human being on their own similar quest in the process. But, this applies not simply to sexual love and close, intimate relationships. It applies to any relationship we have with another person, for all relationships have the potential to bring us closer to the Heart of God. Gemini, like Venus, is all about the sort of relationship we have with our own higher Self and our journey to that space.

One of my recently “re-found” friends commented on the theme of the preceding paragraph well when she said “We attract what we are.” Like attracts like. It is occult Law. I would take this a bit further, though, and say that not only do we attract what we are (for we are all love in our higher essence), but we also attract what we carry within us – the thought forms in our energy fields (aura) – usually the negative, out-grown constructs of our individual psyche to which we have continually contributed and so assiduously constructed over the years.

We have all heard it said that nature abhors a vacuum. Nature also abhors unresolved polarities and always ceaselessly moves toward resolution of unresolved “stuff” within us and polarized thinking. In other words, all outmoded thought-forms are also on the board for removal from our system because they block the realization of the Soul’s purposes in life. I am being very general and simplistic here, but hopefully the point has been made clear enough. Thus, we encounter those people or situations that help us to remove them if we do not do the needed work of removal ourselves, for whatever reason. We attract those people to us who have similar or complimentary energies that will help us to heal and resolve our own inner nature and the other person’s as well, or our own Souls and the Souls of those involved will set up the situation for us. Relationships are a great catalyst for this sort of thing. This is also occult Law. We call it the working out of karmic necessity in most instances. Gemini rules over this aspect of human love.

The Role of the Sun and Pluto

This brings us to one of the main aspects in the chart of both this festival and the Venus conjunction – the opposition of the Sun and Pluto. Aspects to the Sun are among the most important aspects in any chart, especially in full and new moon figures. What follows may seem a long digression, but we are in a phase of human history when things are greatly accelerated for us and the clearing that must take place in the process is also thus accelerated. Pluto is the primary planet that deals with the resolution of all those thoughtforms embedded and buried within our energy fields. There is a most fascinating dynamic that gets set up within a person when Pluto is active in a person’s chart or within a situation (horary) chart, such as this one.

But, before I go into that there is a relationship between Venus and Pluto that I need to cover here. If we look at the orthodox glyphs for both planets we find that they are very similar. We will also see that their energetic interplay is closely linked as well. We covered the glyph for Venus in the last article. In the glyph for Pluto we find the circle of Spirit floating above the cross of matter, which is itself buried under a crescent moon. The symbolism points to the liberation of Spirit from the cross of matter and from the memory of past experience, which the moon represents esoterically. It is the liberation of the Soul from the lunar lives (the persona) and most specifically from desire-mind, which the moon also represents. To put it very simply, the glyph for Pluto represents the mastery of the Soul over the persona and release from the bonds of the past. This idea of mastery over personal impediments to spiritual progress ties in very nicely with the degree of the Sun in the figure for this Festival of Goodwill. It reads thus:

“A famous pianist giving a concert performance” 13 Gemini

When we learn to release the streams of thought that are no longer of use to us and which hold us back, we gain in mastery over ourselves, to be true, but we also release more of the Light of the Soul into our lower nature and we stand to display certain gifts (virtuosity) that only the Soul can give. What those gifts are will differ from person to person because Souls are as individual as personas. But, Pluto will aid in releasing the gifts that this degree of the zodiac represents for each of us if we are up to the task. And, practice makes better, you know? The more we are willing to offer up our fondly cherished negativity and habitual thinking for release and successfully do so, the better we are able to serve and to stand in our spiritual being. The degree of Pluto is of note as well. It reads thus:

“A Chinese laundry” 22 Sagittarius

This is an interesting degree. Dane Rudhyar uses the term “self-containment” in his analysis of this degree, along with the retaining one’s cultural heritage and being able to draw on that and thrive in any given circumstance, especially in alien cultures or situations. I feel his description is quite apt here, and we should note that Pluto is retrograde, both in this figure and in the Venus transit figure. The work of Pluto is turned particularly inward at this point in time and its work is being very closely tied in with the realignments in human affairs that Venus is bringing about in this period. I have mentioned that Pluto gives mastery over the past, which it does. But Pluto also releases the gifts of the past, for the past is very much more than outmoded thinking, restrictions and inertia. The past is our heritage and the good from that should always be preserved and drawn upon when needed. The past lies buried in our individual and collective subconscious and in our immediate, accessible memories. Pluto governs that which lies buried in the subconscious. As the lord of that part of our psyche, it thus governs certain key areas of the body which are very much connected with that aspect of our consciousness – the solar plexus region and the base of the brain, including the cerebellum.

I have mentioned in other articles how the solar plexus is a great clearing house in terms of human energy, how the vast amount of its work is done during the hours of sleep (re: the crescent moon in the glyph of Pluto), how it is intimately associated with lunar consciousness and thus with the Eastern concept of kama-manas (desire-mind), or the lower mind. It is essentially the animal, instinctual mind and it works very much like a processor, organizing the happenings of the day and the night into a usable synthesis for our conscious mind to draw upon in the waking state. It is also very much more than that, being a great psychic eye as well, but this will suffice for now. The base of the brain is known to occultists as the alta major center and it is primarily a monitoring and clearing station for all the centers down the spine prior to their energies passing into the vault of the skull and vice-versa.

The 3-headed dog Cerberus from the Greek myths is the symbolic guardian of that gate to the skull. The brain stem is the atavistic, reptilian consciousness and governs all the base life processes and fears, whereas the higher portion-the cerebellum and lower portions of the mid-brain govern all our successful efforts at coordination and integration with the higher centers. Some esotericists are apt to think of this part of the brain simply as the primal part of a person, but it is much more than that and there is a lot of refinement (higher heritage) that resides in that center as well as the baser instincts. When Pluto is active and clearing needs to take place in a person, both of these centers are often activated and a whole host of fascinating physical and psychic symptoms can manifest for a person, although “fascinating” is not the sort of term the person going through it would use at the time.

In part three of this article, Malvin discusses the power of Venus and Pluto with regard to the spiritual life, as expressed through the sign Gemini. He considers the energy centres, or vortices, called Chakras, and the way they transmit and generate consciousness between the human body-mind and the world.

Read part three of The Goodwill Festival