*
PATTERNS OF SIMPLE EXPEDIENCY
Self-assertion must be identified and measured through its impact upon tangible elements in experience. Considered in any special sense apart from circumstances and function, activity is unknowable, remaining a generalization. Whenever the astrologer attempts to get the act-of-self disentangled from the totality of its involvements, he succeeds only in putting his own point of view in the vacuum he has hoped to create for his examination. He becomes at once a victim of what William James identified as the psychological fallacy, merely uncovering the reflection of his own ideas. Men of necessity see themselves in others, since the single vision has its own characteristic twist. In consequence the judgment of anyone must rest upon a common experience, never upon any supposed grasp of individual differences in isolation. The actual assertiveness of a given person is recognizable only as others are able to share in its implication. Hence astrology is compelled to chart all activity in terms of its significance within a social complex.
This means that an act-of-self is measurable not at source, but rather in its terminal relations, or through the ends to which it is directed. Action is knowable as it has an object, therefore, or as it can be described in some phase of purpose, move towards potentiality or response to possibility. The planets dramatize this, whether in terms of momentum or capacity, as simple EXPEDIENCY, i.e., activity objectified or reduced to measurement. There are four patterns of simple expediency by which man becomes sovereign within the periphery of his own consciousness, in both large or small compass and for both long or short periods. Thus he can (1) alter the emphasis in his own life processes, (2) re-examine and modify the personal values which motivate him, (3) change the superficial situation in which he finds himself, and (4) create new significance in the over-all social reality. These modes of self-assertion, to be explained at length in the following pages, constitute the four domains of activity in the astrological schematism. They correspond in fundamental fashion to the four worlds of experience in circumstances, and to the four alchemies in function.
The geometrical basis for the equatorial and ecliptical mansions gives a certain rigidity to the fourfold and similar distinctions among them, but these groupings of the planets are no less grounded in a fundamental unity — since they map the total activity of a closed system of energy — despite the fact that the domains can as easily be three, as they once were, or five, as is possible with Pluto's discovery. The utilization of four provides a closer parallel to the house and sign schemes, thereby aiding the mind's organization of these relations. The classification is obviously a logical construct which does not exist in nature but which does, nonetheless, give an understandable form to the actual unity charted by the planetary interrelations. This is an organic completeness which follows of necessity from the fact that the positions of the planets, as well as their significations, are established by the earth, very literally.
The criteria by which the planetary bodies are arranged in groups are (1) sequence in the heliocentric places of the orbits, (2) relative swiftness of mean geocentric movement, (3) adjacency of orbital situation to the earth or sun, (4) special affinity in physical characteristics, and (5) date of discovery or entrance into human experience. The first two of these standards have a positive correlation, and it is not necessary to distinguish between them in identifying the fundamental pairs, although both considerations have their part in creating the symbolism.
Of the ten planets now employed by astrologers, the sun and moon stand apart from the rest, and are known as the luminaries or LIGHTS. The first of these takes on the earth's own zodiacal motion, and becomes the positive member of the pair. The other, as the only true satellite of the earth, becomes the negative. Their mathematical relationship to the ecliptic is that of no deviation in a direct orbital circling, a species of self-sufficiency which couples them in the drama of the skies as the domain of VITALITY. They present, together, the greatest regularity of geocentric movement, and they also differ from the other eight bodies in the fact that neither is a solar satellite.
Mars and Venus occupy orbits adjacent to the ecliptic and can be said to represent the practical nextness of relationship to the earth, thus symbolizing everyday activity or a continual immediateness in experience. The superior planet, as astronomers designate the former, presents the positive factor as the simple outreach of self-assertion to superficial potentialities. The inferior body charts the negative implication, or the lean back upon the surface momentums in normal life. These two, therefore, establish the domain of EFFICIENCY. In their geocentric mean motion they are quite close to each other — identical with the sun in the case of Venus, and showing their near approach to the earth's norm — and in physical make-up they have the greatest degree of demonstrated affinity with the sphere on which man finds himself. They become a horoscopic pair on the pattern of the sun and moon, very naturally.
Jupiter and Saturn, outermost of the seven bodies known to the ancient and medieval astrologers, are linked as a third pair by the lack of (1) that adjacency in orbit to the ecliptic which brings Mars and Venus together, and (2) the special relation to the earth which couples the sun (as a geocentric body) and moon, as well also as by (3) the slowness of their mean motion and (4) the relatively slight condensation of matter which characterizes them as physical masses. This consistency of both remoteness and alien nature has constituted them the domain of MOTIVATION, or of man's subjective disjunction. The nearer body of the two becomes the positive member of the group because its position suggests the mediative function by which the cosmos is drawn inward to man in a rather symbolical sense, the outer planet thereupon suggesting the corresponding negative distribution of man's conscious substance back and out into a universal totality. The greater intimacy of indication provided by this domain, in contrast with the superficial relations charted by Mars and Venus, gives it second place in the fourfold schematism.
Uranus and Neptune have a special kinship through: their relatively recent date of discovery; the progressively outward positions of their respective orbits as solar satellites in relation to Saturn; with their consequent increasing deliberateness of zodiacal movement; added to the fact that they are invisible without a telescope.(1) They create the domain of social efficiency or SIGNIFICANCE. Uranus, as the nearer and first discovered of the two, becomes the positive member. The basic theory behind all meanings assigned to the three new planets is that they should parallel, in their indication, whatever factors in racial history have come into actuality more or less coincidentally with the years when they were identified in the heavens. Thus they have been given rulerships over specific activities and inventions unknown at the time the older books were compiled, such as the telegraph, telephone, motion pictures, radio broadcasting, air-travel and the like. Also they have been welcomed as a sort of catchall for those things which astrologers with insufficient skills were unable to fine in a horoscope with the other bodies alone.
(1) Uranus can be seen by the eye alone at times, but would be hardly distinguished as a planet, indeed, it was not recognized as such, even with the use of the telescope, for nearly two centuries.
Modern astrology actually encounters a unique human society. It is one marked by a growing universal interdependence, and it reflects a machine age which has developed concurrently with the almost complete disappearance of the world's frontiers. The ravages of war and pestilence, the consistent deficiencies in food and other essentials of health and economic stability throughout the earlier periods, kept down populations and permitted each social group to remain essentially primitive, at least definitely discrete. A world-wide trade existed, but it concentrated on luxury articles. With the Renaissance, however, life achieved a larger potential. The mechanical inventions, following upon the socio-economic revolution, completely redistributed the people of the globe. Cities were built on a entirely new pattern, and society was recreated in such a way that few if any units could depend upon their own hinterland. As long as available frontier country provided for the general overflow from social pressures, the old modes of life could continue to function, and they did so. For them the more simple, three-domain or older Chaldean astrology was wholly adequate. But with the exhaustion of all possibility for more horizontal expansion, the economic strain became wholly internal, giving social growth a vertical dimension. A different basic way of life became necessary for the first time in the many long millennia of known history, and the three outermost planets have their major usefulness in charting the new problems to be solved.
Mercury, originally the odd planet when its six fellows were paired, and now Pluto, an equally extraneous body which is significant through its discovery in the present generation, are much alike through the exceptional irregularities in the position and shape of their orbits. Thus they stand apart from their eight companions in the stellar drama no less sharply, if more subtly, than the luminaries and other pairs, and it would be entirely possible to constitute them a fifth group. A more practical end is achieved, however, by viewing them as supernumerary bodies, each serving within the domain. of activity where its position and motion naturally classify it otherwise, and thereby providing a means for mapping a specially mediative type of self-assertion. This technique is more effective than any establishment of the additional pair because it adds a dimension to the more simple or basic business of being, permitting the two planets to become indicators of heightened potentials, greater skills and abnormally stimulating or inspiring agencies in man's modern experience.
Here is the one-remove perspective, found as a vicarious or entirely theoretical and tentative act-of-self, i.e., a purely mental or intellectual activity. It is something which has always been identified through Mercury as mind, and through Pluto it is charted as the new vertical outlook or instinct in a mass intelligence. The first of the two mental indicators — in this assignment of their dramatic roles for the purposes of horoscopy — takes its place as a supporting player in the domain of efficiency, where it has the same type of mean motion as Mars and Venus, and Pluto is given the task of delineating the current generalized trends of thought, the broad lines of racial interest, in the domain of social significance.
The four domains of simple positive and negative potentialities are unified continually in the total act-of-self. Each of them charts a special degree of co-operation with some one of the others, depending on whether the emphasis is upon (1) circumstances, or a problem of time and place, (2) function, or a problem of character, and (3) activity, or a problem of more or less assertion. Thus VITALITY is personal with MOTIVATION in any emphasis upon circumstances, is objective with EFFICIENCY in any emphasis upon function, and is conjunctive with SIGNIFICANCE in any emphasis upon activity. EFFICIENCY is impersonal with SIGNIFICANCE in any emphasis upon circumstances, and is disjunctive with MOTIVATION in any emphasis upon activity. MOTIVATION is subjective with SIGNIFICANCE in any emphasis upon function. Here is the anatomy of planetary relationship, corresponding to the interweaving of axial and triadic distinctions in the houses, and of quadrature and triplicity in the signs.
TABLE XI
The Anatomy of Planetary Relationship
Planetary Domain Circumstances Function ActivityVITALITY Personal Objective Conjunctive
Sun, moon
MOTIVATION Personal Subjective Disjunctive
Jupiter, SaturnEFFICIENCY Impersonal Objective Disjunctive
Mars, Venus,
Mercury
SIGNIFICANCE Impersonal Subjective Conjunctive
Uranus, Neptune,
Pluto.
Planets which together constitute one of these domains whenever significantly linked in a given horoscopic pattern, show the particular specialized act-of-self to be a conflict between positive, negative and super-numerative phases of an individual's more narrowed experience as perhaps constituting certain of his basic momentums. Contrariwise, planets more essentially different in their nature and symbolism are, when so linked, significant in their measurement of an out-reaching towards a greater self-fulfillment, thereupon suggesting — according to the table — that an individual's interest or proper concern is a matter of broad issues in circumstances, function or activity, as the case may be. Significant linking, as far as this text is concerned, is the position of two or more of these bodies in the same house or sign. The relation through planetary ASPECTS, while adding a real dimension to horoscopic analysis, is beyond the scope of the present survey.(2) The classification of the sun as positive, personal, objective and conjunctive is exactly akin to the designation of Aries as positive, northern, fiery and cardinal, and of the first house as angular, horizontal, occidental, of the self's triad and below the earth.(2) A simple but adequate outline of the aspects will be found in the author's How to Learn Astrology, to which reference has been made in the footnote on page 26. The full treatment of this vital factor in both the basic and the dynamic horoscopy is provided in the larger context of analytical postulation by a seventh volume in the major series, Fundamentals of Number Significance, still in preparation.
VITALITY: SELF-ASSERTION IN PURE MOMENTUM
Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us.
Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia
The sun and moon, in any horoscope, reveal the pattern of expediency by which the native gives attention to the necessities of life itself. They do this because their cycles afford the closest approximation to the rhythms of individual identity. The sun, the positive indicator, takes the keyword PURPOSE, and the moon, or negative or complementary focus of living as such, is FEELING.
The Sun
The sun as an indicator of purpose shows self-assertion through its most simple and essentially naive impact on life in general. It reveals the character at its point of greatest consistency in circumstances, or where the native is most indomitably himself in welcoming or creating the sort of situation in which he feels the most comfortable. The heredity — all family and racial background — is manifest through the will in this necessary fidelity of itself to itself, hence the horoscopic typification of the individual, that is, the astrological dramatization of the being as a whole, has its basis in the sun's place. It has been pointed out that a person's appearance gets its broad outline here, the ascendant showing the environment modifications, and the moon (or some special aggregation of planetary bodies on rare occasion) adding elements of manner, and perhaps even physical deviation, as the manifestation of any overlying subtle, psychic and wholly intangible influences. Individuals tend to conform predominantly, in their external appearance and characteristics, to (1) the sun sign, (2) the rising sign or (3) to the sign containing the moon (or exceptional grouping of planets). A TYPING indicated by the sun testifies to special directness in the life, the native largely fulfilling the converging lines of his blood and training throughout his act of being himself. This is in contrast to the case where an ascendant-typed person holds more consistently to circumstantial leading, or where a moon-typed person remains essentially deviate by all normal standards. Where the sun is prominent or focal in the planetary patterning, the life is inclined to function more simply, on the one hand, and with an excess of ego or unconditioned self-reliance, on the other. Contrariwise, the native's career is shaped rather opportunistically — by the actual events constituting his unfolding experience — whenever this planet has no particular horoscopic emphasis, and when he does not particularly favor its sign indications.
Will, the primary self-assertion of any person, differs from the identity in the fact that the latter, a circumstantial indication, is the composite of the self as known in surface and wholly exterior contact with others. The will remains the eternal core of personal being, totally unconditioned and necessarily devoid of dependence on anything other than itself. Here is the focus of all existence in its dynamic potentiality of continuing to be whatever it is. This is what can say "I," and what in consequence is identified as the ego or entity presupposed to stand behind or beyond qualification. Hence the sun provides the measure of inherent integrity or self-confidence, i.e., the act-of-self as viewed entirely in its own terms. All the other planets show a form of activity which depends on this inner or under and unswerving flow of the being. There is a foundation sequence of personal reality in the fact that a self is experiencing its own existence. The ramifications of personality are an addition to this, somewhat after the fashion of beads strung on a cord. The sun presents the practical more or less of the native's simple continuance as the phenomenon of identity per se, revealing how and under what conditions he may increase or decrease his personal reality by what adds up to an activity of will. The power to do nothing certifies his capacity to do anything or everything in any given particular. Here is a pattern of expediency shown in the horoscope by the sun's relations. The will is (1) positive because it acts in and of itself, (2) personal because it has no possible connection with anything which it refuses to accept as its concern, (3) objective because it instruments the utterly direct and unmediated relations of self to everything other than self, and (4) conjunctive because it centers reality within itself through its own self-assertion. Hence the sun is the planet of individuality per se, the continuingly original act-of-being underlying experience.
The Moon
The moon, in its indication of feeling, shows the self's act of being itself in its most simple and essentially naive response to external stimulus. It reveals the character at its point of greatest pliability in circumstances, or where the native is most completely unconditioned in his ability and willingness to go along with any given phase or direction of human activity. Thus the planet measures the particular receptivity to experience in the pattern of a given life — which is the negative expression of vitality — and this has two important horoscopic implications. In the first place the moon charts any lack of self-restraint. This can have adverse consequences, contributing to a very primitive spread of the being, or what may be a complete absence both of privacy and of any desire for it. In the second place, it patterns an individual's personal touch with his total context of reality, the possibilities as well as actualities of all general relations with other people, thereby establishing the point of public emphasis and impact in any astrological wheel. This is where feeling is grounded on the lowest level, to become a more specialized emotion whenever these contacts with the outer and practical world, at any phase in their manifestation, begin either to encourage or threaten the act-of-self in its negative phase of vitality, that is, its wholly instinctive more or less of unconditioned response. The moon in consequence reveals experience as it has yet to acquire the modifications in self-assertion which the other planets measure. Hence this swiftest of the ten bodies becomes the natural distributor of personal relationships in events, a role often compared by astrologers to that of the minute hand on a clock, or the second hand on a watch. The lunar indications in everyday counseling are largely neutral in this sense, carrying the implications of the other bodies to every minutiae of function and circumstances, and so ever demonstrating the nature of vitality in its receptive aspect. Here is the general activity of pure organic functioning.
The moon is negative because it maps the basic response of self to everything other than itself, but it is as personal as the sun in having no concern with that which does not enter dynamically into the substance of being. It charts personality, in contrast with the individuality shown by the sun. This is the warm and acquiescent focus of selfhood in living relationship. What the first house rules as the knowable aggregate of the being — that is, the point of ultimate mobilization by the self against a specific need or crisis — the moon measures in the self's fundamental experience of itself. Whatever the native constitutes the basic mood of self-assertion through his moon's sign and house is revealed by him to the world as a fait accompli, namely, a person, at the ascendant. Hence, if the eastern angle is the place of the moon in any native's case, he is apt to be overeager in human contacts, or prodigal in his vitality, simply because he lacks a spread through circumstances as a means for orientation in this process. Thus the lesser light is no less objective than the greater, and it is as conjunctive in respect to the minutiae of other reality. Vitality is predominantly lunar when individual activity is peripheral rather than central. All aimless and experimental outreach of selfhood, becoming in due course a ramification of emotion, is charted by the moon. This can be sympathy as the sheer more of self in its willingness to grow, expand and increase in a dynamic fullness of itself, or antipathy in the corresponding less of self whereby, in its basic distribution of its energies, it feels itself flowing out of rather than into its own reality. The potentialities of personal feeling, in general, support the anticipatory experience of individuality in what it has yet to become in particular. Consequently the moon indicates imagination, on the constructive side, but also hallucination or psychological unbalance of every sort whenever the self-act is inadequate.
MOTIVATION: SELF-ASSERTION IN PURE CAPACITY
When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.
Seneca, Epistulae ad Lucilium
Jupiter and Saturn, in any horoscope, reveal the pattern of expediency by which the native gives attention to the motivation of his personal activity. They do this because their cycles afford the closest approximation to the typical rhythms of a true social world, Jupiter, the positive indicator, takes the keyword ENTHUSIASM, and Saturn, the negative and complementary focus of inner life as such, is SENSITIVENESS.
Jupiter
Jupiter, in its indication of enthusiasm, is the great benefic of traditional astrology, long regarded as the most fortunate planet in the horoscope. Early astrologers visualized its activity as that of a policeman, in the sense of providing a tireless and continual protection over life, hence establishing order and bringing events in line with man's best personal interests. It measures the point of greatest factor of encouragement in a native's experience, since it reveals that natural expansiveness or indomitable spontaneity of self by which he is able, in varying degrees, to achieve the ends he desires. Because this is usually a pleasant sensation, the blessing of Jupiter has always been sought assiduously by devotees of the stellar art.
The planet rules the expediency in shaking off any particular shackles of limitation, and the thrill in any genuinely fresh experience. Perhaps most commonly indicating the simple joy of adventure, as in a first journey along and the like, it has a still more important role in charting the elements of self-discovery. These may be quite destructive, although very gratifying for the moment, as in prodigality and many forms of wantonness. The planet fundamentally shows the positive activity of motivation — or of life as made personal on the conscious level of responsible realization — and this is subjective, or creatively self-contemplative. Here is the deeper participation in experience, as compared with the more simple continuance in existence as an objective organism which the sun and moon reveal. It is the disjunctive self-assertion of basic selfhood, in contradistinction to the conjunctive vitality mapped by the lights, i.e., a conscious and discrete sense of self according to its own inner realization. Jupiter in the horoscope is the point of emphasis in the continuing process of birth and rebirth, as in contrast with the degeneration and death ruled by Saturn. It describes the early unfoldment of selfhood, exactly as the negative planet of motivation outlines the maturity of life, on through the declining years and up to the final withdrawal of consciousness from physical existence. Jupiter, as the positive disjunction in the personal and subjective act-of-self, shows the actual maturing — i.e., growth per se, especially as this remains wholly under the direction of self — but Saturn charts the surrender to exterior domination by other people, not only with the lessening of interest in living or senility but also through the formative period of discipline in childhood.
Jupiter always measures whatever serves to expand or fulfill the actual, conscious or immortal selfhood. Among other things, it gives a horoscopic clue to any tendency towards social accumulation of wealth and position as well as physical fleshiness, together with any proclivity to indulge ambitions and appetites which produce or accentuate swollen possessions, overweight and any psychological sense of importance. The quickening of the soul or conscious selfhood to the potentialities of experience becomes a native's capacity for discrimination, or good sense, the sagacity which this planet rules as in distinction from the dispassionate intelligence of Mercury. This becomes religion or spirituality as an awareness of moral or ethical standards. These values exist because they are commonly accepted, so that their pursuit facilitates a normal self-expansion. It is obvious that the individual who is inclined to destructive expression, who is appreciably anarchistic or freakish in tastes and conduct, can have but a minimal assistance from the life in which he participates. Things are not good because Jupiter identifies them, but because human society prefers them, and it is this moral preference which makes them expedient when it comes to entering into experience. Unsocially disjunctive acts are the result of weakness in character relative to some particular norm or potentiality, indicated by an inadequate emphasis of Jupiter, and any positive activity on the level of motivation is therefore, in general, a breadth of inclination towards encouraging everything at its finest, or responding on the basis of whatever best potentiality can be visualized. This is consciousness per se, or the type of act by which the ego becomes an actual discrete entity, capable of an immortal existence. When such a self-appreciation is exalted, as in the sense of a touch with some higher or supernal reality, the native may achieve a genuine spiritual inspiration. He may take on a priestly function among his fellows demonstrating a public spirit or a real altruism, but he may also fall short in a smugness or bigotry.
Saturn
Saturn, in its indication of sensitiveness, has a much greater concern than Jupiter with the deeper, interior and eternal phase of motivation, charting the personal self- realization as more consciously disjunctive because it is negative and essentially reflexive. Here sagacity becomes wisdom, or a completeness of inner resolution. In the astrological tradition the planet has been the dreaded great malefic, always measuring the certainty of ill in an age where men expected the worst.
What is actually shown is the uncompromising fidelity of the self's act to motivating decision, or of consequences to their contributory origins, whenever the self takes or accepts a definite set of its own. Because medieval man depreciated himself, he put himself under bondage to a certain pattern of idea, and was compelled to live in the world he established. Any uncertain individual today may prefer a definite ill, relatively easy to precipitate, than some uncertain good calling on him to expand his own powers and to develop his own constructive potentialities. This is the negative phase of motivation, or consciousness on its lowest level. More Happily, however, Saturn has also been symbolized by the judge, giving assurance of a final verdict on human intention, effort, and achievement. This is disjunction as truly subjective or creative in the sense that nothing is lost ultimately. Death is not cancellation, but rather reassignment. The negative indication of motivation, seen outwardly or from a fore-view, may be the literal termination of the given life -- more commonly the end of some particular cycle of experience -- but this is an assurance of continuity, giving a time measure in existence by making consequences significant. The planet fundamentally charts whatever remains in consciousness as real beyond or through the focus of any particular form of interruption or superficial alteration in the self or its affairs. Thus it rules the support gained from land or exceptionally fixed possessions. Unfortunately the older astrologers saw this subjective and disjunctive persistence of personal sequence on the destructive side only -- when they encountered it in the Saturnine of negative phase -- and so they identified it with the self-sustaining karma of the East, or the pervading ill-fate of the Dark Ages. Because consciousness here rests so largely in the depths of its own potential, it may seem as unpleasant as the spontaneous out-spilling of Jupiter is the reverse. Hence Saturn is the point of fear or suffering in the horoscope, not an immutably bad fortune, but rather the possibility of self-activated change. Superficially it is illness and maladjustment, but the indication may be taken much more constructively as a definite key in any problem of health. Personal subjectivity may be seen to determine the physical condition of the native, and organic well-being may be taken as conscious self-adjustment.
Saturn shows the psychological sensitiveness of a native as his self-delimitation in a personal well-being. It reveals his disjunctive withdrawal from various outworn phases of experience, sometimes smoothly and so evident as little more than a loss of interest, and equally often in quite dramatic fashion, the retreat then becoming a distinct defeat at the hands of circumstances. When such an event represents a definite embarrassment, there is real suffering or distortion in consciousness. If the situation is serious, there may be tragic concomitants. All these details are mapped by this planet in the general pattern of expediency. Sometimes the attempt at self-extrication from a situation will lead to an unwitting or deliberate and calculating deception, to an unsocial and perhaps unfair manipulation of others, or to an acceptance of a personally distorted world of treachery and criminality.
Disappointment, discouragement and dissatisfaction are all forms of inadequacy in the self's disjunction in experience. The constructive mobilizations of consciousness may be no less high-strung, but in their touch with the depth of the native's potentials, in their refinement of sensitivity and their capacity for real suffering, they offer a sure foundation for further experience. Saturn thus indicates how completely the self may be stabilized within itself, individually, in a co-operation point by point with Jupiter's spontaneity.
EFFICIENCY: SELF-ASSERTION IN PURE CONVENIENCE
The end of good is an evil, and the end of evil is a good.
La Hochefoucauld, Maximes Posthumes
Mars, Venus and Mercury, in any horoscope, reveal the pattern of expediency by which the native gives attention to the everyday and relatively impermanent eventualities which he must manipulate in his own interest. They do this because their cycles afford the closest approximation to the rhythms of transient superficiality in ordinary experience. Mars, the positive indicator, takes the keyword INITIATIVE; Venus, the negative and complementary focus in this surface activity, is ACQUISITIVENESS; and Mercury, the supernumerary and mind factor, is MENTALITY.
Mars
Mars, in its indication of initiative, provides the basic approach for any understanding, through the horoscope, of man's day-by-day efficiency. The passing and shifting thresholds of choice or decision are his objective means for an impersonal disjunction of life's relations as he encounters them. This process of an opportunistic self-act, when seen as pure convenience, is little more than efficiency in affirmation or negation, in commencement or refusal to begin. Neither vitality nor motivation are involved, since existence is now to be measured on the impersonal side, or where simple trial and error become the rule. The objective disjunction of activity is accomplished by bringing every potentiality of self and its situation to the immediate moment and location of experience, over and over again in the kaleidoscope of events. The familiar ruddy planet charts the way in which a native starts things, or the pattern of expediency under which he releases, directs and applies force or energy of a tangible sort in the world about him. It identifies the point at which each successive and experimental phase in his external affairs is inaugurated. Venus, by the same token, shows how he stops his action, completes his endeavor, or reaches the corresponding point of consummation in some given context of passing events. Mars, therefore, is pre-eminently the planet of superficial or practical impulse. This at its most aggressive extreme becomes undisciplined or brute force, and it may be manifest either in violent action against others or else in temper and a psychological and reflexive whipping of the self to a state of heat and excitement. The astrological literature has been filled with various interpretations of the dogged or unquenchable martial energy, not always making it clear that there is no potential of self-continuance in the expenditure. Here, rather than the persistence of the personal planets, is a reiterative or recurrent effort which not only requires stimulus but a continued re-stimulus also. An overcoming of resistance to self, through some inertia exterior to self, is always involved. This may or may not imply a species of actual conflict, but it necessarily includes an act of precipitating or inaugurating, whether conventional or original in nature, and whether leading to approval or disapproval.
Life, in its general or impersonal efforts towards the recognition or disjunction of reality, is highly competitive, and Mars represents a native's simple effort to capitalize upon whatever element of conflict seems to concern him. This is the aggressiveness at the root of all objective experience of self in its relations to its everyday world. Manifest constructively, it is generosity and courage, but in its inadequacy it becomes ill-temper and the high destructiveness of fear. Mars in the horoscope reveals the fashion in which anyone finds the things at hand most useful, thereupon seeking to control them without assimilating himself to them in any personal degree. Here is the foundational self-assertion underlying all skill, or trained and habitual distinctions of an impersonal and objective nature. It is activity which is potentially creative as it leads to the development and refinement of methods for accomplishing specific tasks. In consequence the planet rules mechanization and technical as well as manual dexterity, both in their perfection and their employment. This does not mean outstanding inventiveness, or any true genius with its necessarily subjective foundations, but the direct and impersonal employment of tools and instrumentalities in all cases where they remain convenient, agencies for the simple and immediate inauguration or administration of act in response to stimulus.
Venus
Venus, as an indicator of acquisitiveness, complements Mars — as has already been indicated — by showing how man stops or completes action, or consummates his relations with all factors immediately at hand in experience. The negative phase of the impersonal and disjunctive self-assertion represented by this planet is found in two entirely distinct forms of expediency, however, both of which constitute the termination of activity on the level of everyday efficiency, but each of which may seem very much the contrary of the other. First is the careful preservation of things in general, whether animate or inanimate, and whether a matter of tangible objects or of the transient ties and relations among them. This is terminal to the act-of-self in the sense of a dismissal to automaticity. It is a direct and conscientious cherishing of something at the stage when it is not felt necessary to do anything about it. Other types of activity may come into play, as the organic functioning of life in terms of vitality, the conscious realization or affirmation of values, and so on, but physical action for the moment is no longer stimulated. Cessation, if experienced, is merely an enjoyment of satiety. Second of these expedient phases of action shown by Venus is a stoppage through direct destruction, and this must be distinguished carefully from the positive antagonism of Mars. It is fundamentally the careless or self-indulgent dissipation or abuse of whatever lies conveniently at hand, commonly including all types of degeneration and drifting in ordinary relations. The planet thus gives a valuable clue to any carelessness, slovenliness, or stubbornness in normal act and attitude, as well as their psychological counterparts in vanity, conceit and gullibility. Where Saturn charts a reduction of reality to conscious values, Venus indicates the more simple canceling out of this same reality in a deficient or entirely false appreciation, or a totally unwarranted taking of things for granted.
The cherishing of all human possessions, measured in principal part by this negative indicator of pure convenience, is the act-of-self as simple enjoyment. There is no more continuance per se in consummation than initiative, so that such consummatory realities as money and resources have to be put to use, all genuine love has to be quickened, every possible variation of esthetic fulfillment must have its exercise through an expediency of everyday relations. Static accumulation is shown by Jupiter, as has been pointed out. The self-challenging vitality of human interest is no less a personal matter, hence acquiring its rulership by the lights. Venus is of great importance in horoscope interpretation through its identification of money and property as the one wholly impersonal means for the objective disjunction or efficient placement of various higher facilities. Financial resources make it possible for any individual to dismiss multitudinous acts-of-self to the care of others. Romance is a climactic phase of everyday relationship — as is all esthetic efficiency in general — permitting a very similar resting of the being in a possession or accomplishment which differs only as a matter of language, or the deeper ideas involved, from other consummations. Great emotion, as an organic experience in co-operation with an object, is personal and conjunctive, and so measured by the moon. Efforts to create beauty or adorn life, however, are a move to bring the act-of-self to efficiency, and thus to experience a reward for the effort in the entirely disjunctive enjoyment to which it leads. Perfumes and luxuries, as well as food, clothing and all possible possessions of a transient sort, are facilities of self-fulfillment of the impersonal sort which Venus shows in astrological analysis.
Mercury
Mercury, in its indication of mind, provides the horoscope with a reliable guide to whatever general potentials of self-orientation may 'be brought to focus in any immediate or practical experience. It is supernumerary in nature because the expediency it charts transcends the necessarily direct stimulus to which activity under Mars and Venus must respond. It shows an act-of-self which is no less impersonal, objective and disjunctive, but one which is basically responsive to the persisting center of individuality on the one hand, and to the constancies of all experience on the other. The planet derives its meaning in part from its particular astronomical eccentricities, and in larger part from the closeness of its orbit to the sun. Venus is linked to the center of the physical system in a similar fashion — so that the consummations and enjoyment charted by that planet are always a folding in of superficial reality upon the self — but Mercury can get only a little more than half as far away from the parent body and in consequence represents a greater dependence upon center, in a type of activity akin to the will expressed on the personal level by the sun itself. Mercury is particularly impersonal in its move now to one and now to the other side of the great luminary, while yet partaking of a definite centrality in experience as the most inward of the true solar satellites. Normally retrograding three times a year, in an accentuation of this looking now forward and now backward, the planet becomes a point of mediative activity in practical being, enabling the individual to make choices in an almost complete freedom from time and space. This is essentially the intellectual act per se, because it depends upon neither beginning nor end and has no necessary relations to anything other than itself. Intelligence centers reality in full and continual conformity to individual convenience, and mind in consequence can be seen as the completely disjunctive focus of awareness.
Mercury, in its rulership of man's focalizing power in every-day affairs, primarily charts methods and modes of communication and thought, together with immediate action which has indirect but practical effect, such as oratory, dramatization and educative effort. It measures the general operation of memory, reason and any individual capacity for utilizing values, symbols, tokens and the like for self-orientation in any particular situation at hand. This includes the employment of language in every phase of articulation, ramifying to comprise all means for the exchange of ideas or reactions, and ending up as any ability for seeing how man's generalized or codified knowledge and science can be put to work. It identifies tools when they are automatic, mechanical or otherwise developed so that anyone can use them without the expression of particular initiative, and shows all active development of community, national and racial skills or facilities. In every case this means act or choice by proxy and delegation, together with the pre-emption for self by adoption or orientation of another's action and choice. It rules nothing possessed of actuality in separation from other considerations, that is, its disjunctive activity is objective or efficient in function. Man's mind does not operate by itself, but must use borrowed notions, images and symbols. It is impossible to think, except in or against the thoughts of other people as these in some way express a common reality. Therefore the planet ultimately outlines the various forms of rationalization, explanation, justification and self-realization by means of which human intelligence remains competent in its self-delimitation. Hence the planet has its greatest horoscopic significance in disclosing whatever genius the native may have for controlling his own practical focus of awareness, and for recognizing his own efficient center in everyday experience.
SIGNIFICANCE: SELF-ASSERTION IN PURE ADAPTABILITY
All power is a trust, that we are accountable for its exercise;
that from the people and for the people all springs, and all must exist.
Benjamin Disraeli, Vivian Grey
Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, in any horoscope, reveal the pattern of expediency by which the native maintains his basic position in the society of which he is a member. They do this because their cycles afford the closest approximation to the broad social changes in the given age. Uranus, the positive indicator, takes the keyword INDEPENDENCE; Neptune, the negative and complementary focus of group concern, is OBLIGATION; and Pluto, the supernumerary and mental factor, is OBSESSION.
Uranus
Uranus, in its indication of independence, brings social reality down to the point of individual opportunity, showing the instinct to act for the group — and so impersonally — as in contrast with simple self-assertion in a more primitive and personal reality. The planet reveals that area in the horoscope where the native is most free to express himself according to his own subjective but conjunctive notions, that is, where he will have the maximum co-operation and appreciation from his fellows in his especially deviate or unique efforts. It therefore provides the measure of originality and genius, over and above the power of initiative shown in the horoscope by Mars — and is the act-of-self in the larger social dimension which transcends both the primitive will charted by the sun and the naive spontaneity indicated by Jupiter. It describes any person's gifts for social as against purely superficial self-expression, and gives important light upon the directions and conditions under which the native may participate in the larger potentials of civilization. Here is more than personal
distinction, which was known to the world long before 1781. Uranus is essentially a planet of deviation in a highly creative sense, actually inoperative in any area of conscious experience unless there are elements in the individual life which are somehow challenging to the entire context of a modern world. There must be something to endow each new-age man with a justification for himself through some species of definite contribution to higher existence in the lives of those around him. This is where impersonality is as subjective as conscious motivation. The masses are carried along in the events measured by these new bodies in astrology, however, and the impersonality is thereby as conjunctive as organic vitality. Uranus is positive in blazing the new way for the race, but what it reveals may never have any direct psychological significance for the individual.Racial progress, of course, must continue in its own terms. Uranus indicates these new and original facets of group activity, such as are consequent upon the evolution of a machine-age culture, but only at the stage where they remain a novelty to men in general, and especially to the average narrow and self-blinded native. The first necessity of inter-dependence in social institutions is a continual emphasis upon the interweaving co-operations as such, and in consequence the planet indicates the large-scale ideals and schemes which are being carried to a point of achievement, not those which the race as a whole has been able to dismiss to the commonplace. What is shown is the outreach to uncharted and broader potentials of human activity, but entirely as these are anchored in known and ordered realities already possessed, i.e., as they are conjunctive despite their uniqueness. A wild utopianism is as foreign to racial and personal independence as the conventional and constricted individualism of tribal life at the other extreme. Uranus is a normal planet in every respect, and the beginning of any effective pioneering into broad and more theoretical or artificial dimensions of existence must be founded upon that regularity of touch with ordinary life which is dramatized in the very arrangement of the three new bodies. Thus Neptune begins to be strikingly exceptional in its heavenly situation, and Pluto carries the irregularity further. These points, already explained, reveal how the sequential development of implication through the bodies of recent discovery presents a move from lesser to greater deviation, and seems to indicate that a progressively larger dimension in man's experience is correlated with a mounting distortion in cosmic orderliness. This suggests that the independence of Uranus calls for an increasingly common sharing of greater potentials in all possible new experience. The planet charts the expansion, never the loss, of the creative normality involved.
Neptune
Neptune, in its indication of obligation, charts the negative facet of cultural self-realization or the fundamentally impersonal, subjective and conjunctive activity of modern social compulsions. It identifies that point in the horoscope where the individual is under the greatest necessity to do what the group as a whole wishes him to do, or where any extreme of co-operation or allegiance is demanded of him by other people in general. These are the native's required relations to the new and interdependent culture, revealing his continuing bondage in varying detail to necessities larger than his comprehension as the price he must pay, whether or no, for any enhancement of his social liberties. Thus Neptune, in every chart, describes the situation under which anyone is brought up short most definitely, whenever he fails to respond to the opportunities for this larger mode of being. It indicates the way in which he finds his strength dissipated by the psychological drag of a complicated community organization. His social sensibilities may be reassured or confused below the level of consciousness, since Neptune is both negative and subjective, but the whole complex of his personal experience may yet be hampered here by the continual demands of overwhelming realities about him, if he does not make some voluntary contribution to the current community vision. The planet disciplines him constantly, to make him creatively aware of group values, and it maps the conditions under which his act-of-self may be given exemption from a necessity to support things which, to him as an individual, may seem inconsequential and unreal simply because of their remoteness.
Here in consequence is the area of the horoscope where the personality finds itself under its actual obligation to alien ways of action. The self-enslavement, when an individual's general social interest is deficient, may take the form of a substitution which, more often than not, may be a resort to unsocial perversions instead of an enlargement of self-function. Often there will be an employment of artificial compensations in the form of drugs, or other facilities of modern life, as these may be twisted into a false service and final betrayal of self. Psychological escapism, or fantasy as a direct surrender of conscious control over ordinary experience, is shown by the moon on the lower level, since a mere emotional overflow is involved. As an adverse effect of the maladjustment indicated here, under Neptune, the conjunctive activity may become a social despair, however, and the person who cannot rise to the full significance of things in a larger society is apt to become anarchist if not mentally unbalanced, with the ultimately destructive tendency to resist rather than utilize the compulsions upon him. Then he tilts against windmills, and becomes a voice of malcontent in every situation. An adequate or creative interest in the intricacies of community organization, contrariwise, may awaken an individual to the unfolding potentials of his own equally intricate constitution, especially in the instance of someone who possesses or develops the skills to make an enduring contribution to his day and age. Thereupon Neptune charts the higher type of group intuition, the social insight or possibly even prophetic capacity which enables the more competent native to express the race destiny in some measure, and hence to capitalize spectacularly upon his place in the scheme of things.
Pluto
Pluto, in its indication of obsession — taken as potentially no less constructive than unfortunate, or as the compelling vision by which men are caught up out of themselves in a transcendence of lesser living — is the planet of mediative activity in cultural self-realization, or is the mass mind which directs the basic formulation and communication of social concepts in modern life. It is, as a matter of subjective conjunction, what Mercury continues to be as the objective disjunction of ideas and notions in experience. Neither are personal, or concerned with organic well-being, on the one hand, and with motivating norms or values on the other. Pluto shows the native's impersonal response to his group's needs and dangers. Where the capacity for social vision is inadequate in a given case, it reveals the resultant unawareness of the more significant trend of events, and so shows any inclination to become involved in some wrong, unprofitable or purely visionary line of effort. Most simply, it identifies the point in any astrological wheel where the personality is affected primarily by group or race ideas, thus becoming stimulated or repressed, as the case may be, by the impact of generalizations arising outside individual experience. Pluto is best seen at all times as a cosmic Mercury, indicating in every respect, on the larger scale and in the universal dimension, what the longer-known planet shows normally. It thus identifies, quite conveniently, the great isms by which men are either welded into group actuality or else divided among themselves. It also shows the underlying and often entirely unsuspected general orientation in the presuppositions of every modern individual. It discloses the nature and influence of propaganda, whether put forth consciously or unconsciously, and whether with essentially good or bad fruits.
When the native co-operates with the best of world-wide developments in a given generation, he is inspired to a continuing and genuine social service, one which is both actual and intellectual. This is the only way in which he achieves a maximum conjunction of the potentials inherent in any larger pattern of his own self-assertion. Pluto's most important role thus to outline the effectiveness or discordance of any individual's obsessing vision in the light of the dominating potentials in group progress, and to give him guidance in grasping his opportunity as a cosmic citizen. This outermost planet reveals the universal mind of mankind in its witting or unwitting attempt to achieve and share the social insights which take living significant in any real sense, co-operating here with the indications of Uranus and Neptune. These three planets move so slowly that they can give but the slightest indications of any true personal difference. However, even when their individual testimony in the horoscope fails to be very illuminating, they aid in classifying the native according to his fundamental orientation to the current over-all scheme of things. They provide a frame of reference in which the other planetary indications may be seen with exceptional effectiveness, since they provide each generation with its own particularly modern character. In this the new planet of obsessing vision or visionariness discloses the real social intelligence of each separate personality, irrespective of any inadequate response on his part to the immediate challenges of today's interdependent society.
TABLE XII
The Planets and Their Keywords
THE SUN - Purpose JUPITER - EnthusiasmTHE MOON - Feeling SATURN - Sensitiveness
MARS - Initiative URANUS - Independence
VENUS - Acquisitiveness NEPTUNE - Obligation
MERCURY - Mentality PLUTO - Obsession
Astrology, How and Why it Works