Suffering the destruction of a marriage.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Cheroo" <Cheroo@(removed).com>
To: <all_astrology@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, May 07, 2002 4:38 PM
Subject: Re: [all_astrology] Re: 7th houth Lilith (was: Yods)

> Hi all, I have a question....I have been told that the divorce that I am going thru after 23 years of marriage and 8 children is a fated event...that there is something I am supposed to do that I wouldn't do if I remained in my situation.... what does this mean? I am trying to work out the situation and reconcile but it's a no go for him. Does fated mean it's hopeless for me to try and I should just pull up my bootstraps and go forward?
>
> My birthday is Dec.18, 1958... MA, 2:16 PM
> His is Oct. 3, 1958, MA 9:21 PM (Cities removed to disguise actual data)
>
> Thanks, Cheroo

Dear Cheroo,

I have taken a careful look at this situation and by what you write, I assume you love your husband and are willing to fight for the established good of the relationship, no matter what else anyone might say against the idea.

This is called "The Human Spirit." This can only be Love in the pure, strong form, no dilution. This powerful feeling is only accessed through suffering. The root of the word, "Passion" is in Latin, "passio," meaning (to the early speakers of Latin) "to suffer." To suffer love was to understand its deepest secret: that of total surrender to its power. In honor of this, we say that we "suffer love" when it bites us mean and hard and we must stand and grit our teeth like good soldiers. (Warriors)

This relationship is in a mid-crisis for the suffering of Love.

Here is why I characterize it thus: Your husband has the Moon (ruler of all the women in his life) in Gemini at 17 degrees. It opposes Saturn in Sagittarius at 20 degrees. We have an eclipse on June 10 at that degree, so this situation is intense, oppressive, full of karmic stuff that won't come apart, like sugary bread pudding, all difficult and lumpy and sticking together. The Saturn is on his Moon, representing your depression, and the Pluto is opposing it, representing what is being projected : a complete top-to-bottom change of the partner: you.

This last weekend Mars and Saturn conjoined, lending this whole horrible month intense and cruel feeling. I am happy to report that it is going to feel this way for the month, and then no more. Try to endure!

Your chart shows a resource that he does not have: toughness. You have spunk and verve and a "step right up" attitude, with Mars in sugary Venus' sign, Taurus, square the inventive and "I'm onto you, baby" Uranus, there's a special magic, but it can be intense as well!

Your squares make your life demanding at times. This serves very well on those rare occasions where the big protector is required to come out to defend family from foes. This is made more large by the fact of Jupiter's involvement, suggesting a sanction by law (as an example, you may have legal course to own firearms, Jupiter/law, 6th house service--the cop--Mars/Uranus--the "explosives.") This is fairly dynamic stuff. But, it is not in the angle. It's in the 12th, 3rd houses, meaning "away from you," but nevertheless in your experience, between the neighborhood, the siblings, these sorts of factors, or perhaps your father was a cop. Whatever it is, the story behind your chart is about something of this Mars/Uranus nature.

Husband, on the other hand is Mr. Accommodating Libra. He'd rather go to a quiet room for serenity than face the constant energetic concerns and dramas of the more dynamic stuff of your "side". He's an Air Sign rising, one which was marked by the Saturn retrograde of last fall (2001) and whose recovery of the degree of the zodiac from which he previously turned retrograde coincides now with the June 10 eclipse.

Natally, you each have a luminary involved with Saturn, which is what brought you together. You have the Sun (male) conjoined Saturn, and he has the Moon (female) opposing Saturn. Ironically, Saturn is figured in what is pulling you apart.

We have a TYPE problem developing here.

CG Jung made a discussion of these types, calling out four divisions, sensation, thinking, feeling and intuitive. Each of these styles have an inferior and superior side to them, so they split into eight parts before we begin to work with them as actualities of human nature. Which is the dominant of our nature? Which one is completely "in the dark?" This recessive type is the area of problem, of psychological pressure. Life will invariably force us to develop this hard-to-access material through the experiences which cause us suffering.

Life demands we must become fully-rounded, and have access to all the types which are contained within us. The chart is a pure example of "completeness" by virtue of its complete view of all 12 signs, inclusive. The entire horizon is depicted, no missing pieces. Completeness, wholeness is the goal of what we call self-development. Completeness is demanded by Saturn, the last planet visible to the naked eye, and representing the "Outer Limits," and "Ring-Pass-Not," of the cosmos. However, Saturn's demand for completing our maturity is very hard to do, and quite rare to achieve. Nevertheless, it is about fulfilling each one of these type "issues" in the personality, and not abandoning any part to the rocking chair. A big project to say the least.

Astrologers are quick about applying the elements to these functions, the Air element to Thinking Type, and Water to the Feeling. It would seem logical also to apply elements Fire to the Intuitive and Earth to Sensation, but in practice it does not work. The concepts seem to parallel each other however, so we can (for now) go ahead and make the association, only because we are talking astrology here. The problem is the inferior/superior of each of these has a quite different story than just what the elements provide, and the doctrine of the elements would have to be expanded quite a bit to become Jungian typology, so I'll just warn you about their association and leave it to another long essay to really go deep with this stuff. We can approach it from a superficial level if we go ahead with a few assumptions:

If we say your husband is an Air-Element, we might therefore say his is a Thinking Type. (simplistic!) Your chart reflects much of the Fire Element, something which may be accorded with the Sensation Type (Why not Earth? Again, another discussion) but I would need to meet you in person and actually observe before making any such distinction with conclusiveness. But, for the sake of discussion, I will say while these are seemingly compatible, problems do arise! Completing the circle in a marriage based on the urges of Saturn is the most difficult challenge of all.

The Sensation Type needs for everyone else to sense what is urgent to them; they try to inflame others with their vision of what is a priority and what is not. On leaving a movie about explosions and heros, each of the Types has a different reaction. Sensation types wonder about the special effects-- it is hard to get to the fantasy world when the Sensation Type prevails. They like to know about the little tricks that make a movie satisfying. They are the ones who don't believe in magic and ask the magician for his little secret of how he got the dove into the silk hat. They are the world's least likely sucker, or at least that's what they prefer to think. The Sensation Type level of comfort is raised with being part of a system where they are able to perform in urgency and meet the needs of others in an expectation of loyalty and sustained contact. I think the fire-style square places you in this most popular category as a dominant Type.

Yours is a chart full of fixed signs, so we could also say that the "inner weather report" is quite stable because of stubborn resistance to change. It has served well in the past. Now is not the time to prevent the "error" of preventing the opposite, the inferior function, from being called out for development. We must reverse old attitudes of "what is REAL." Again, these are comments about Saturn, about the fixed sign nature and about Type. Thus, as a Sensation Type, we can add to the movie experience: the addition of all the tickets for entrance, a summary of all the costs involved of getting everyone to and fro (the excursion), mileage, popcorn and good night.

If we continue the movie metaphor, we see different reactions but we must begin with Sensation since so many of us operate under this type. Opposite of the Sensation type is the Intuitive, the one who knows all the magic tricks in advance, and sees around the corners. This Type is opposed to the Sensation Type because it operates on the hidden aspects of reality, and thus are not popular with the Sensation Types. To Sensation, Reality is quantifiable, measureable and logical. Intuitives do not measure or weigh, but process and work in cycles, and constitute the typology that most astrologers aspire to. I say aspire because the Intuitive may require some other treatment to encourage its development: Suffering. The lazy astrologer is unwilling to suffer the treatment of the Odd-Man-Out and thus delays the Intuitive development. The Intuitive Type perhaps sees the movie, and recognizes other story lines which are parallel. The movie of some years ago, "The Piano" is not about a piano, says the intuitive. "It's about the abandonment of Ariadne on the isle of Thraxos, by Theseus, on their way to Athens." More on this later.

The next set of opposites exists between Feeling and Thinking Types. The Thinking Type is writing his review of the movie while watching it. "The actors were not well-cast for their roles," or "George Clooney is always just George Clooney. That's not acting."

The Feeling Type loves or hates the movie depending on whether Justice is served on the protagonist. The movie studios seem to want to please the Feeling Type with pre-digested plots concluding with the Happy Ending; but this is really a pander to the Thinking Type. The area of greatest darkness for the Thinking Type is the area of Feeling, so Thinking is "superior" to Feeling. Thinking wants to dominate the Feeling motive, so we hash out various Happy Endings so as not to disturb the functioning of the inferior motion toward the watery, down pour southward to the land where Feeling goes: the lowest level, water's favorite place. The Feeling Type is not necessarily "sentimental," this is a quality of the inferior "opposite" belonging to the Thinking Type. Each Type has itself as the superior quality, and its opposite is the direct "inferior" to it.

To locate your own "Type" problem is to uncover a germ of truth about oneself that will keep to the end of your days. It is the solution to the entire problem of the chart! But it is not in the chart, only in the person whose life is being described by the chart. Thus, my statements and assumptions as I write are based on the narrow experience of black, white and paper symbols and highly susceptible, even suspect!

Something which has no access within the relationship (as it now stands) requires attending and full permission to rise up and be expressed. What is happening is that the superior function, that cozy ego place that says, "Ah, this is exactly how everything should be" is being undermined: Pluto and Saturn's opposition are crushing and mixing, sending stuff into the black hole of marital Ground Zero. The opposites are calling out to eachother and their mutual answer is destructive! What's a Mother To Do?

It can only be resolved by using the great maturity required by Saturn in which we must fully face our shadow without any reserve. The Ego is our "Object" of experimentation, where we listen to every utterance of that little unceasing voice chattering away, humming the last song you heard in the air. Who's voice is this? Why does it feel like something else or someone else is talking to us? There might be "two of you" in dialogue? CG Jung referred to this experience as hearing the voices of Number One and Number Two. The Buddhists call this realization, "detachment." In each case, a similar examination of the ever-constant inner voice requires the concentration of Saturn.

Saturn's requirement is for unstinting self-critical inner dialogue which goes to the symbolic heart, either through the chart or through dreams--I prefer both! --and lights a way for a new balance, which is his highest goal. Your husband needs solitude and grace, and will no longer suffer Love without it. Only your silence will buy back the marriage. This in the face of all the criticism and pity, the power crises and animosity which are lauched in your direction–undeserved! But there it is! We cannot demand that the Justice System intervene. But that's how he is addressing the great offense of his own unconsciousness: There Ought To Be A Law!!

You on the other hand can benefit from understanding other potentials deep within yourself which have been masked by the grand cross so described. These figures got front row, they are angular and so insist on running the show. But, that ain't the half of it. There is more.

The "fate" of this situation requires a complete surrender to the Pluto death and transformation theme. If the marriage doesn't die, if that Life of the Marriage is what is top priority for you, then you must seek another death, something else which must constructively "die." To benefit you both, not to cause the marriage to fail, something must die, says Pluto. So pick something. Is there any old junk just laying around "dead"? Start a list. Renovate. Put the Pluto energy to something instead of just standing by and doing "nothing."

Because of your dynamic background story of survival, you have helped your family survive and can do it again. But now, the "other side," (because of Pluto) calls and a complete transformation is required. There is a list of such things that can be allowed to die, instead of the marriage, but we are testing to see just how committed you are (again) and now is the time to send up the big protests and delaying your passive signature on all these papers so as to delay the meltdown too quickly in the legal marriage. The tough spot your marriage is in right now will, by divorcing, avoid the development of the Inferior Function which demands (awkwardly) to have expression within the marriage.

Effective femininity is not a show or a mascara. It is a commitment to serve in silence. Feminine, yin behavior is prized above all at these times. Even as astrologers we go touting the Return of the Feminine, Return of the Goddess. But, how do we behave in her honor?

I must say that the world of the feminine powers has the tonic force to transform this situation. Instead of parading emotionally like we had a contract to fulfill, achieving only shrill sounds that go largely ignored we must contact the deeply yin side of these issues to come to a natural source of real power by returning an attitude of respect and honor to her.

This is what Pluto brings up while in Sagittarius: whose gods do we serve? We are getting a glimpse of a world religion course on the nightly news these days. Priests and little boys, The Dalai Lama in the news, the Pope and the World Decalogue, many religious movements and upsets are current. New respect for the K'ran and a declaration for World Peace from an organization representing the full body of organized religion from around the globe, a symbol par excellence of the Pluto transit of Sagittarius.

Yin and Yang, Lower and Upper, Left and Right, Woman and Man

One of our unconscious religions is the Superiority of the Masculine. The presidency of the United States will serve enough of an example as a lasting bastion of the image of this superiority. Men have a natural superiority because of testosterone which promotes memory and mental agility as well as muscularity. This has not really changed in modern times, and was certainly a more pure truth in much earlier times. But this "natural role" has not changed for men. The contract to get up and work and provide for his family is still very strong, and "natural that a man should work." This is largely the same as it has been for a thousand or more (possibly 30,000) years.

In the last 70 years many changes were demanded by women, and new institutions set agendas for women in career and personal finance. We have a new style of obtaining our needs. We need no longer rely solely on the man. At the time it was rightfully called, "Liberation." There is much good that has been established for women. Sincere efforts on behalf of those who once were Second Class Citizens have paid off, but the complaint of a "glass ceiling" still exists for women in high position.

How we "obtain results" has changed; the style of obtaining security has tainted the previously feminine style. The Yin qualities of silence, passivity, faith, loyalty and so forth are not the subject of Britney Spear's or any other Pop Diva songs. Rap singers and Hip Hop performers do not speak of the Yin qualities of silence, passivity, faith, loyalty, etc.

Like the fish that was too small, these Yin qualities are the lost traits returned to the waters of the unconscious where that old religion about the Superiority of Masculine values is also residing. And now, the passivity, silence, faith, loyalty and so forth are serving this figure. It's a wild loop de loop, ironic, but true. The continuing suspicion against traits of the old femininity is quite strong. Women remain somewhat defensive in areas where such reactions are inappropriate. And women are seen to behave in ways which are shrill and ineffective, parroting a second-guess about what the Patriarchal World requires.

Feminine instinct has been lost in all this time. This is not about whether you are a feminine woman! It is about reactions ONLY. These reactions are listed from the chart as your compulsions, instincts and knee jerks. What god does your unconscious serve?

Passivity is gone. Women don't take the name of their husband to become, "Mrs. Bruce Springsteen" anymore. They don't change household based on the location of their husband's job. Our mothers and grandmothers had many other opportunities to express their passivity. Today, women use the issue of "choices" to demonstrate their greater autonomy from men and refute any passive behavior as "old hat." yet, the very refusal to understand this dynamic has destructive implications for women.

The former characteristics of the feminine woman, once highly prized by husbands, have been "disappeared." The men of our species, whose own agenda for survival has not changed from within like it has with women, are not prevented from longing for these old-fashioned gals. They marry Russian mail-order brides, and so on.

But, just because we can't see the old-fashioned traits being expressed here in the US anymore doesn't mean they don't exist.

We are astrologers! Why have an underworld if a few things can't go down deep, into hidden status only to spring back, resurrection-style. Recycling of the old becomes important and springs up fresh again. "The New Passivity" the cover of Cosmopolitan will blaze at the right time, just as it had when Cosmo's creator published, "Sex and the Single Girl."

Passivity "lives" in the Underworld. What else is down there? That's some of the stuff of a Pluto transit in these times for our women. And now the religion of Masculine Consciousness is served even more. Why? Because in the unconscious, where a woman's inner masculine resides, passivity now strengthens the hold of this masculine religion. Unconscious passivity serves the Animus. Women are contributing to the polarization which splits factions from Peace by virtue of unconsciously allowing their Inner Masculine, their Inferior Function, a free-reign to govern their attitudes. These attitudes whether wrong or right, suppress the old-fashioned ones. The old ones live below the stairs and feed the Inner Masculine, and a self-sustaining destruction is possible. In fact, we see evidence of it in many places.

For instance, when the locker rooms were segregated by sex, baseball reporters had to be male. But, female reporters would be barred from work. So, women were hired to write sports columns and allowed to enter the all-male locker room. Were men accorded the same privilege? No. All the answers for this express this problem of passivity toward the Animus, the Inner Masculine.

Women may protest in shouts and screams when jokes discriminate against women. But male-bashing seems to be considered politically correct. This is a complicated subject, as you can tell. I am trying to sketch out the strange ways in which Pluto appears, and what experiences I have shared with my clients (in totality) borders on these masculine/feminine areas with good results.

I must address these issues more directly in another essay. The point really is that women have had to change roles and assume more and different responsibilities in these last 70 years. Society as a whole has welcomed it. We women are happier to be more in charge of our financial security rather than leave it all to husbands. But there is a mixing of all this which has distanced women from the use of these more yin-style reactions. The Feminine, while we wave the Goddess flag is still contained in the much-reviled feminine skills, (I think of Phyllis Schaffley and that book, The Feminine Mystique) which because they involve a modicum of suffering are not very popular to discuss. They also advocate a downright insincere "fake it until you make it" attitude which does not appeal to the world of the sensation type's "if I can kick it, it must be real," value system.

Cheroo you love your marriage and don't want to break it up, see what you can do to hold the tensions as best you can. He is wrong! Yes, but what's the point? If you work it out so no matter what he may say which is categorically and scientificaly provable to be wrong, by reacting differently, then the Pluto could go to work on killing the part of the Ego that doesn't want to die, and killing it off, thus saving the marriage. If you need to go see a therapist, do so, but because of these pliable, femininine inner structures don't expect him to go. He's blaming you for everything, and for a while you have been on the hot seat. If you can take it, and if you can endure the Saturn retrograde on his ascendant which occurred last September (when all the world was about the animosity, i.e, attacks) it will be worth it...

This first brittle weekend of May, I was on a minor hot seat with the man in my life, who's pissy mood would drive me up the wall were I not so aged (finally! Like an old cheese) and uninterested in Being Right anymore. To be sure, I was right! But, I had to judge whether I wanted to be right or be in a relationship. This comes up often and I realize how confronted we women are by the men in our lives, but if I wanted to continue alone, I sure knew how I was going to do that. Since the same ol' same ol' is not an option, I tried to become more Yin, but also must remain true to my own nature. Integrity counts for everything.

In my family, I have three Libran sisters. My Saturn is in Libra. So, I had to learn about how oppressive my Saturn is, and where Saturn goes for relief: Venus. She is the goddess "foam born," and my sisters are in the beauty business. One is a make up artist, the other a top hair dresser, both in Hollywood. They each make wonderful products which they sell professionally. So, my solution came from my sisters.

I filled a wash bucket with hot suds, got the salt / grapefruit skin rub my sister makes and brought towels out to the garden, where he joined me in a huff. I made him soak his feet and gave him a foot scrub. In less than a half hour, the mood changed considerably. He appreciated it very much. It was a life saver in a tense moment. I can see that he trusts me more, and it was a simple thing. Later, he let me know I was right but of itself, it was not an important victory. I felt more empowered by being able to renew the air of harmony, and allowed that to be my sole concern. I also know from experience that he will remember and tell me when he is wrong, so all I have to do is another Yin style piece of work: wait in patience.

I could have just continued a futile argument, but we needed to Pluto, to transform, so I chose the opposite way around the barn. Women go both ways, since the Liberation of the Liberation. Water finds its own level. Still waters run deep. May we tap into deeper waters still, and be able to hold on to these powerful tensions reverberating throughout our lives, in the public and around the world.