Caroline Casey – The Shift Network – Visionary Activist Astrology

Saturn, known by the Greeks as Chronos (or Time), is the farthest planet from the Sun easily visible to the naked eye. Saturn thus demarcates the boundary between the visible and the invisible. Ringmaster and Ringleader, Saturn’s province includes time, boundaries, laws of limitation and definition, form, structure and authority.

You’ll:

• Work with your Saturn qualities and the wisdom in the Saturnian phrase, “He who hesitates gets bossed”
• Inhale your “author”-ity back from the world
• Honor Saturn through introspection — solitude is the cure for loneliness
• Literalize metaphors to animate solutions for life and to bring your gifts into the world
• Re-examine what’s possible with the guidance of the essential Saturn navigational resource, the “Gurdjieffian Level System”
• Play with form, structure, “author”-ity, focus, boundaries, discipline and responsibility (your capacity to respond appropriately to time’s demands)

Jupiter forms a miniature solar system, with itself at the center of 16 moons. By analogy, Jupiter governs all systems — laws, codes, philosophy, computers and storytelling — as primary ways we make meaning out of life.

To make meaning, we must first cast out our net and gather information. The Jupiter part of us is the Universal Investigator whose task is to approach all aspects of life with reverent curiosity, allowing everything to tell its story.

In this Council, you’ll discover how:

• Jupiter guides you to make meaning out of information
• To approach life with passionate curiosity, “the intelligence of desirous quest”
• Jupiter represents enthusiasm; the original Greek entheos means, “the god within”
• Feeding your enthusiasm makes the gods within you dance
• To participate in the generous circulation of life’s abundance
• The power of honoring, questing, learning, teaching, traveling and feasting

Mars is the god of desire: eros, feistiness, aggression, heat and action. We draw upon Mars for courage, dynamism, passion and kinship with life.

Conscious kinship is made manifest through active participation in heroic endeavor. Mars reminds us that spiritual life is not some passive, safe, wimpy tour; it’s a bold, active, heroic and completely engaged adventure!

As with all the planets, we must fully possess our Mars, or else others will kidnap Mars’ desire and harness it to the lumbering oxen of war and violence.

This third Council will be dedicated to:

• Honoring desire; desires are our instructional blueprints of the possible
• Eschewing suppression of desire — resulting in anger, violence, heartless sex, war
• Working with desire and understanding the interrelatedness of all things
• Dancing with Mars and entering the realm of fire, where qualities of bravado, boldness, courage and forthrightness are forged
• Encouraging the return of all-needed positive yang, Mars allies King Arthur and High John the Conqueror

Venus is the invisible force of attraction, love, kinship, art and relationship. Venus doesn’t have hobbies, she has passions. Our attractions are our primary clues as to how we can make a unique contribution to the world.

Venus makes love to the world and is willing to return the embrace of life, viewing life itself as a loving ally.

In Council 4 you’ll:

• Find what you love, and explore the manner in which you love
• Discover the passion for which you are an ambassador in the court of the human world
• Remember the opposite of aesthetic is anesthetic; there is no solution to anything unless Venus is involved (beauty and love are present)
• Honor Venus by making things beautiful and creating art
• Develop your manner of relating… to everything!

Mercury is the god of mind, intellect, thought, voice and language. Our magical capacity to manifest through language, both thought and uttered, is so central that we often take it for granted and spend time and energy seeking more power.

Instead, we simply need to learn to use the power with which we are already endowed, and which is constantly replenished as it flows through us in acts of attention.

You’ll discover how to:

• Invoke the power of language, developing the Messenger-Magician
• Find your voice, communication… how you think and express
• Honoring Mercury by connecting with the Mercurial element of air — taking an air bath, walking in windy places, breathing deeply and lightening up
• Avoid superficiality, glibness, hyperactivity
• Know when to introvert your Mercury so the inner Mercury-messenger can connect you to the means necessary for the plan’s realization
• Remember to be in love with words and witty repartee

The Moon stabilizes the Earth’s orbital tilt, creating the rhythm of the seasons and thus allowing for conditions that nurture life. The Moon also governs our inner tides of feelings and moods. She reminds us that extroversion and introversion — animation and retreat — are both necessary for a complete emotional life.

As the Moon waxes from new to full, we ride the tide out to initiate new projects. As the Moon wanes from full to the next new phase, we surf back to shore. During this time we sift, distill and complete projects inaugurated on the outgoing tide.

In Council 6, you’ll:

• Discover how moods are messengers from our tradition to ourselves and “spirit mail”
• Express your moods and glean crucial pieces of information from them
• Develop your capacity to feel what’s needed, and respond appropriately
• No longer suppress your mood, attempting to carry on “normally”
• Nourish and cultivate your projects

The Sun is the central heartbeat, the energetic, animating force of all life. As the Sun passes through each sign of the zodiac, it brings that image-force alive, as well as the presiding god of that sign and season.

The planets all reflect the light of the Sun, so at each important solar celebration, the Sun shines most strongly through the presiding planetary force of that time. By joining in these celebrations, we have an opportunity to participate in remaking ourselves and recreating the world. The Sun speaks to each aspect of our personality, awakening its loving and magical potency.

In this last Council, you’ll:

• Discover your essence, radiance, expressiveness, magnanimity and confidence
• Develop your fruitfulness, creativity and central self
• Regenerate your personality, identified with the source
• Honor the Sun with ritual or simple watching the sunrise and sunset
• The Sun’s motto, “Create Theater or Live Melodrama” — reminding us playfully (or ritually) to express ourselves, create theater, and get in the game

The Outer Planets

The Outer Planets will also be covered within the modules and they will be partnered with each of their planetary hosts sequentially.

We draw Pluto’s glyph as the circle of spirit being cooked in the crucible or transformed in the grail. Pluto works in three phases. Phase one is disruption of the outer world, which catalyzes descent into the Underworld. Phase two is not-knowing. Phase three is the surge of authenticity that occurs as the soul rededicates itself to its remembered mission. The more we cooperate with the process, the faster we move through the sequence.

We’ll:

• Honor Pluto by releasing control and feeling comfortable with not knowing
• Learn from the ancient myths of initiatory Underworld descent to provide reassuring roadmaps to the future
• Discover how Pluto embodies death, rebirth, transformation and the alchemy of desire
• Explore our relationship to all things unseen — death, sex, spirits, ancestors
• Restore to sacredness that which has become taboo

Neptune presides over the oceanic realm of dreams, imagination, vision and myth, inspiring us in the poetry, art and music that bring conscious kinship alive in our community. Neptune is the part of us that sleeps, dreams, creates myths, then makes music and art to bring those myths alive. A culture or individual without a guiding mythology of kinship and the art to make it manifest is like a boat with no rudder being tossed upon Neptune’s waves.

We’ll:

• Explore art forms that inspire yearning and remind us of the reality of our mystical kinship with all beings
• Get “hooked” on Neptune’s trident — what happens to a culture, family or individual when there is no guiding, living vision — and getting unhooked
• Avoid the shadow of un-honored Neptune (addiction, romantic melancholy, passivity, disappointment)
• Honor Neptune with vast spaces, reverie, staring out the window, being at the ocean, ecstatic self-loss
• Discover key qualities of Neptune: dreams, visions, imagination, transcendental beauty and the ocean

Uranus is the god of uniqueness, intuition, innovation, ingenuity, rebellion and rascalry. We all have a maverick within. Intuition connects us to the larger dance of creation and, through the agency of synchronicity, keeps us all in touch with each other. Through the intervention of meaningful Uranian coincidence, we are the words with which the universe talks to itself.

We’ll:

• Awaken Nature’s raw, experimental drive with ourselves — Uranus is the lightning that strikes the circle of habit and turns it into a spiral
• Encourage our intuition, the accurate sense of potential inherent in a person or situation
• Find freedom through the loss of the non-essential (of course, Uranus often has a different idea from ours of what’s essential)
• Avoid angst without outcome, erratic rebellion and procrastination — Uranus’ shadow when not honored
• Develop our “disciplined wildness”