"My definition of learning is discovering that something is possible." —Fritz Perls
Mars retrograde began on April 17 in Sagittarius. In late May, Mars retrograded into Scorpio, bringing us to the heart of the matter of this rare transit. The retrograde ends in Scorpio on June 29.
Mars is the planet of desire. Desire is one of those elements at the core of the human emotional engine. It's true that religions and spiritual philosophies line up one after the next attempting to prove to people that desire is the worst thing in the world. Yet nobody would seek being happier, or seek knowledge, or crack open a book about Buddhism, if they didn't want something.
The deeper question of Mars is what you do with the propulsion that it offers. Do you resist? Do you deny, or feel guilt? Do you let it run wild and therefore run your life? Do you harness its power and put it to work for you?
We are now experiencing an even rarer event, Uranus conjunct the newly discovered planet Eris in Aries. We might be noticing this one, except that it's difficult for anything to get noticed these days. This happened last in early Aries in 1927 and 1928.
It's describing the chaos we're experiencing in society, and in our minds, that's coating the world in the haze and glaze of glamour and making many relevant things difficult to see. I could hardly think of two more potent factors to put together to create mental turmoil and confusion. We can take this on the level of toxic chaos, or fertile chaos. Fertile chaos requires applying awareness and discernment.
Uranus in Aries (2010-18) is the era of the smartphone and the selfie: of unmitigated self-obsession, and obsession with image. Pluto in Capricorn (2008-2024), a corresponding transit, is about equally unmitigated greed. Together these make up the Uranus-Pluto square (most potent effects from 2011-15). A few years back, we interviewed Martha Lang-Wescott about that aspect, which is still lurking in the background of everything we're experiencing.
"It sounds like this unbidden empty narcissism surging from the depths of Pluto and all of its psychological scars. People can get distracted by the twinkles and the erratic behavior of Uranus and overlook Pluto," she said. Pluto addresses deeper material and is a more urgently necessary agent of growth.
The erratic behavior Lang-Wescott is describing includes the conduct of various political movements which we are now seeing come to a head: The Tea Party has taken over the Republican Party in the person of Donald Trump. We might ask why Trump is so popular, and for a real answer we would then have to ask why abusive people, in general, are so popular among sensitive, educated people. What is that really about?
Uranus and its effects being more visible, it's serving to mask a whole layer of awareness. Lang-Wescott continued, "There is the show and the excitement of Uranus [in Aries], and then there's this underbelly of the concealed drives of Pluto [in Capricorn], such as greed. Uranus presents as the perfect distraction—all this technology stuff—when Pluto is often acting invisibly. There's also the attraction to the dangerous element of Pluto charisma"—for example, why people might be attracted to Donald Trump as a candidate.
The Uranus-Pluto square is now separating, and a new aspect has emerged: Uranus conjunct Eris in Aries. The two are part of the same pattern, and now Uranus-Eris is being emphasized. It's pushing the glam thing to its very pinnacle. Everyone is a rock star on Instagram. We are supposed to overlook not only that it's meaningless but also where that energy could be better spent.
For its part, Eris in Aries is a massive identity crisis. It can barely bring itself to ask the question "Who am I?" because it makes the question seem unanswerable, or perhaps invisible. No matter how many versions of your business card you make, or how many online profiles you post, the question does not answer itself.
The thing to remember is that it's a hypothetical question with a fictional answer. While we may possess some supreme identity, and seek access to some set of "original instructions," identity on this plane of reality is a kind of fictional entity.
Yet it can become useful once you express identity as purpose, and as you integrate all the many facets and fragments of yourself into one core idea of who you are. Much of what we call healing involves doing precisely this.
Now Uranus is coming along, and is merging the glamour aspect of Aries with the disruption element of Uranus and the identity chaos element of Eris. The result could be a hot mess—or it could represent a time of genuine breakthrough on the theme of self-discovery and self-actualization. We have had a lot of hot mess lately, as you might discover if you initiate a conversation with people about anything potentially controversial, such as how they feel about life and love. The personal breakthrough, however, is not a prefabricated thing, and there is no telling where it will lead. That would seem to be the whole point.
Here is the problem as I see it: the need for an organizing or perhaps orienting principle. Aries represents the energy of pure potential. It is motive looking for a purpose. Purpose needs some guiding force. If one purpose of the current astrology is self-actualization, what is the core instinct that will drive that process?
Here is another: Self-discovery takes courage, and is wrought with perils. The most prominent of them is how it has a way of dissolving your previous self-concept with something more tangible. If someone is attached to their self-concept, they are unlikely to seek anything that would change it in any way.
Many have, I observe, a real courage issue here in the digital age. There are those days when everything besides what is wholly unreal seems too real. Anything more than launching an app is too great of a risk to take. The world is blown up in one action movie after the next; people routinely fight zombies and survive alien attacks; and the world watches from the comfort of their entertainment station or tablet.
I think that a lot of this comes back to image: of needing to be seen a certain way (often, how one is not), or being afraid to be seen a certain way (often, how one really is).
Mars in Sagittarius possesses some glamour of its own. It's a fire sign thing, though the glam of Sagg will seem to have more substance to back up its image. That doesn't necessarily make it so. I would say an example of celebrity in the style of Mars in Sagittarius might be the rock-star pastor of a megachurch.
Mars retrograde turns that to a question about what is really true. The crusading quality of Mars in Sagittarius is reversed, and becomes a personal inquiry. This is potentially uncomfortable; it involves questioning assumptions and also getting beneath the level of image, and in particular, the image of piety.
True, most people don't associate themselves with cardinals carrying crosses parading around in red robes outside the Vatican, but there seems to be a strong impulse in contemporary culture to seem pious and pure.
This can lead to a real crisis, and not just one of belief; once you get past the layer of belief, the next layer is existential. Think of what religion really is: It's a contract with existence. Is your contract something that you wrote yourself? Do you have your own lease on life, or do you use the standard Bloomberg version? The standard version is typically what was impressed on people through their early religious and moralistic training. It tends to leave no room to make up your own mind, and when you try to, that can be beset by conflict.
On May 27, Mars retrograded into Scorpio, entering the realm of what is beneath the realm of belief. Scorpio is the level you can't do anything about. One can try to gloss over the core of biological necessity (what Scorpio represents, on one level) with ideas about reality (what Sagittarius represents, on one level).
It's also possible to get them into alignment—to create a belief system for yourself that reflects the deeper truth of what a person is, and what you are, rather than contradicts or attempts to conceal it. And this is what Mars, weaving back and forth between Scorpio and Sagittarius all year, seems to be doing.
What I'm calling the core layer, Mars retrograde in Scorpio, can serve as a point of orientation. Start with the biological level of your existence: your body, your feelings, your instincts. What are they telling you?
If you're picking up some form of anger, pain, or guilt, that's unlikely to be on the instinctual level. If you are picking up something that feels more like hunger, that's more likely to be on the level of your biology.
However, we do have a few possible issues related to pain and the need for healing. One of them is embarrassment. If you feel guilt or shame associated with desire, that's calling for healing—and to seek that healing you would have to admit your underlying desire.
Another is not knowing where to begin your healing process; being overwhelmed with confusion or frustration at where to start. It's necessary to place trust in the hands of someone who is helping you. If you don't, you're closed down to being helped. Often trust is impacted by repeated failed attempts, or betrayals. That does not mean your desire is wrong. Nor does how often you were told it was wrong, or told others theirs was wrong, make your desire wrong.
What if you were actually to stand in your desire, and admit it openly? Do you think you would become a savage, insatiable animal? Or could you manage your hunger like an adult—you know, Chinese, sushi, or stay home and boil some spaghetti?
The answer may come down to how you feel you will be perceived. It's just strange: Craving sushi or spaghetti does not make you a glutton.
Lately I've been revealing a series of teachings I've learned in the process of my tantric studies. Here is one for you. In sexual relationships, women are the teachers. We are all birthed from the cosmos of the female body and the emotional sphere of the female experience of sex. In this sense, there is something inherently cosmic about the female. Honoring this, tantric wisdom suggests that it's women who initiate everyone into birth and, by association, into death; and along the way, into sexual reality.
Yet there's a question of what to do in a society where so many women are so injured, feel so broken, are angry at sex, and angry at men. There is a question of what to do when so many women, who are our teachers, have been convinced and continue to convince themselves that they are something other than human.
This is a challenging question. I don't have an answer, though I think that we might get some help from returning to the physical, body-level of existence where all this stuff we're perceiving is happening. Were women to follow the instinctual rather than programmed level of their reality, I believe it would lead to a balanced, healthy, and expressive mode of emotional and sexual exchange.
The thing is, at some point, openly admitted desire must enter the discussion. One cannot teach effectively, and raise the level of consciousness, and be in denial at the same time. This would go against our society's current trend of criminalizing all desire.
A second possibility may be found in men who have made contact with their feminine side—a great many have. Many, many men have cultivated their feminine side and have in a sense adopted the preserver energy (inherently female), which has served to preserve the wisdom of women's bodies. It's not merely that all men are not rapists.
Rather, it's fair to say that as many men are more comfortable with the female body and female emotional realm than are women, and we can seek them out as people who might be helpful in initiating women as teachers. In any event this is existing knowledge, contained in our DNA, our memories, and our libraries, and it's time to put it to use.
