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This maining contains both the late Capricorn and early Aquarius birthday reports. They are prepared separately. Because Capricorn and Aquarius are both Saturn-ruled signs, those born under eith sign may find both useful.


Aquarius Birthdays, Part One

THOUGH THERE are many subtle elements present in your solar return chart this year, there are two vivid presences you're bound to experience: one is Saturn in your opposite sign Leo. The second is Chiron in your birth sign. The transits are closely related; one is redefining you (Chiron in your sign) and the other is helping you redefine your relationships (Saturn in Leo).

They've been making a series of oppositions for a couple of years, which have now shifted from the Cancer-Capricorn aspect (where you experienced them one way, perhaps a bit in the abstract) onto the Leo-Aquarius axis, where they have become much more personal and tangible for you.

The result is an ongoing negotiation process between you and your world; your life and the lives of the people around you; your trajectory of individual development and how this expresses itself in your relationships. This is not considered an "easy" transit, yet it's exceptionally useful, and part of a process that has been underway since the summer of 2003. So it's not exactly news. Yet everyone who is under its influences (those with Saturn ruled signs such as Leo and Aquarius certainly are) would do well to track the history in their own personal life, and, if possible, in your natal horoscope.

You may also want to compare notes with anyone who has a Capricorn Sun or ascendant and get a feeling for how their lives have gone the past few years, and see if they can summarize their adventures and life lessons.

Indeed, how would you summarize your own? Compelling factors in the summer of 2005 may have brought a turn in the story of your life, or raised a sense of revelation with which you are still coming to terms. I think it's vital to remember that anything you may be living through now is a continuing story rather than something that's arisen out of the blue. Both Chiron and Saturn speak volumes about the past and how we relate to it, and their opposition meeting, which repeats in a cluster of seven times in this great cycle, recurs every 40 or so years.

This has a twofold signification. Chiron through Aquarius is, or will be, making an exact conjunction to the natal Sun of all people born the first week of Aquarius, which is compelling you to redefine yourself in some fundamental way. You may be painfully aware of your father's shortcomings; you may be aware of how he was missing, or the ways in which he was missing; you may be coming to terms with your sense of being 'missing' from the world or from your own life.

What you can get in touch with under this transit is some root element of who you are. Chiron is an influence that goes quickly to the core. This is often quite disturbing to Earthlings, and yet if you stay with the process, you can make contact with an essential element of yourself that you've long been missing, and will welcome, once you identify it and give it a name, and make it your own -- that is, make you your own.

One thing I can tell you from doing a lot of astrology charts is that people do tend to underestimate the influences of their parents, as they attempt to figure out why their life is the way it is now. Total denial would be a less than polite estimation, but perhaps a more useful way to say it would be that much of what we feel and experience goes on deep beneath awareness. Chiron's job is to gradually bring what we already know to the surface.

Chiron never does this quickly. Indeed, one of the marks of Chiron is the gradual quality of the progress, but where Chiron gets a reputation for sudden and irreversible changes is mainly the result of our awareness shifting fast after many subtle callings. Remember, too, that Chiron has intimate associations with Virgo, which always wants to work things through layer after layer until finally there is a breakthrough in the process.

It's partly for this reason that I suggest checking in with the history of what you're experiencing now dating back to the summer of 2003 (which I will repeat in the Capricorn essay that follows), and also making contact with a certain quality about your father that may on some deep level be responsible for a disconnect from your own life that may have plagued you for decades.

If this quality has shown up as "losing yourself in the whole" or the sense that your own individuality does not count; if you were not recognized as who you were as a child (a common enough occurrence, but with Sun-Aquarius, there is a peculiar comfort with that condition that you may finally be wanting to shed); if you have always figured that you would never quite fit in; Chiron has arrived with the potential to let you out of that dimension.

Saturn in Leo is providing a crucial counterbalance to this process. Consider first that Saturn is the true ruling planet of Aquarius. Today it is said to be Uranus, which gets the "true enough" rating; or we could say, "not quite true enough." To disjoint Saturn from Aquarius is to misunderstand both, and to remember that they are aspects of the same energy is to give yourself an advantage in astrology and in life. Energy must be structured; innovation is not anarchy; change is the only constant; these are the messages of the Saturn-Aquarius connection.

Saturn in Leo means your ruling planet is in your opposite sign -- the sign that signifies relationships, partnerships and "the other." This is a basic astrological condition. In one form or another, it happens many times a year that a planet occupies a sign opposite the one it rules. What this is doing is putting a planet that signifies you (Saturn) into a location and energy structure that represents your relationships. You can as a result see yourself in others that much more clearly, but moreover, you can relate to their experiences. For those who are dealing with Aquarius people in one form or another, remember -- they may be more accessible now than you've ever known them to be, though the switching point may be timed with the exact conjunctions of Chiron to their natal Sun.

In any event, as an Aquarius, what this situation is doing is providing you with a container for the relationship experiences you need. That container may be a household situation, a work situation, a partnership or boyfriend/girlfriend thing, or a friend; but it is a container, and what is being contained is something about you and your changes, and it would be a fine thing to treat carefully and work with consciously and truly experience the benefits of in a loving way.

Contact is possible like never before; you are not alone, surely not alone as you've thought you were in the past, and if you reach out to life and those who participate in it, life will reach back to you.


Capricorn Birthdays, Part Four

WE HAVE ALL EXPERIENCED the phenomenon of changing an idea about ourselves, and then having the world change around us. Sometimes it's subtle; sometimes it's so glaring it's a little startling. You decide you're ready for something and then it happens. You decide you deserve a raise, and you get one. You decide it's time to have fun, and fun happens. It's beautiful.

As long as it works, that is. When it doesn't work, the result can be a sense of frustration and self-blame. It can feel like trying to turn the key to the universe when the battery is dead. And it happens to all of us at some time, particularly if we've decided to become conscious of creating the life we want, based on the values we truly hold dear. And that is something I know you've been involved with for quite some time.

In this fourth Capricorn birthday report, which will in large part be applicable to all born under the 10th sign of the zodiac, I would like to begin with looking at why the key might or might not activate the ignition.

With Chiron now making a long-term transit through your 2nd solar house -- your values and your resources -- you can make great strides at discovering, living and expressing your values. You can finally address the unnecessary and painful self-esteem crisis that is nothing short of a pandemic in Western culture; and you can discover something about yourself that you will carry forward as a positive resource through the rest of your life.

So, onto our subject of "change your mind and the world changes." My thoughts are not fully formed; I'm going to be doing some thinking out loud.

To some extent, we have all experienced this and we believe it's true. Whether you seek information from psychology, religion or magic, the act of internally allowing something to be helps it become so.

Often the difference involves a change in self-perception; from unattractive to attractive; from unemployable to employable; from worthless or mediocre to valuable; and even from unhappy to happy. But often underlying this is an emotional state that may strangle us for a long time, and then finally let go. Emotional states and beliefs have a truly odd and difficult-to-see connection to one another. It is for this reason that "mere words" that address a certain belief can actually help turn a person's emotional state around, or assist in getting to a new level of self-understanding.

I am making it sound simple. Perhaps it is, or perhaps it's ridiculously mysterious.

Working on the level of belief is deeply important. When we believe things about ourselves that are not true, we can quickly (or in the very long term) become prisoners of those beliefs. It happens to nearly everyone from childhood; the long-term presence of Neptune in your solar 2nd house (where Chiron now is) is suggesting that you do have beliefs about yourself that, to put it simply, are not true. You may have tried to untangle these beliefs in the past; now with Chiron in your 2nd solar house, I think you will have more leverage than ever. The question is not merely what you believe, but what is the sponsoring value underneath that belief? Who told you something you took as true, what do you personally hold as important (and why) and most important, what do you deny? Denial is a value, indeed, a master value that influences all others!

Sometimes a shift in environment helps. Going to a new place, for a day or a week or for years, can teach you something about yourself, or make something that once seem fixed about you and the world suddenly be mobile and flexible. Environment is a powerful conditioning factor, in part because it fires up within us the very process of adaptation that we're trying to get going in the first place. There is one crucial astrological factor, Uranus in your solar 3rd house, that is saying you would benefit greatly from changes to your environment, and from working with the spontaneous personal changes that the local situation offers you once you spark up the flow of energy.

At other times, environment after environment will yield similar results, and though you may not seem to be making progress, I would contend that on some level you are, if only through cultivating this crucial human process of adaptation. Apparently the environment is more intimately a part of who we are than we might imagine, despite the often repeated adage that "change comes from within." But this always begins with noticing.

With Chiron in your 2nd house, I suggest you keep vigilant about what is important to you. I feel that this should be the main quality that you use to distinguish yourself from others: your priorities. And I can pretty much assure you that your priorities are in the process of changing, or you are in the process of noticing that they have changed. Tracking these developments and the little bursts of awareness that arrive will help you find more of what you want in life and help you find the right people with whom to share it.

Which leads to another factor, a sub-topic of environment: the group or groups you associate with. There are two larger possibilities along these lines: that you truly seek and find individualists, or you become a prisoner to peer pressure and conditioning that very nearly completely overshadows who you are and what you want. Since most of what is important to us is associated with others, in particular their agreement to support or withdraw support, you need to be surrounded by people who share your values. You're not going to make those values real alone -- not with Aquarius in this house.

The origin of the 2nd house is money and how we feel about it; and you will go a long way toward making any rearrangements necessary when it comes to surrounding yourself with people with whom you share common ideals, values, and visions for your economic life. This includes how money is made, and why, and what you do with resources when you have them. Economics of any kind is a community activity. In a community where trading is held of a high value, the people for the most part be excellent traders. Where the arts are valued, artists will be born; where teaching is a value, there will be productive teachers who feel it's natural to garner their personal support and wealth from the act of teaching.

To the extent that Capricorn is a leader, there must be people to lead; to the extent that Capricorn is adept at organization, there must be people to help organize and support that organization. To the extent that Capricorn aspires, there must be a vision worth aspiring to.

Often, it is the prolonged effort that counts; the continuing reaching for a goal that draws us along the journey and, though it may seem unattainable, surely over time we make authentic progress, even though we may not see it; that is, until we look.