Tag: planets
Mars is the planet popular astrology loves to celebrate. Angular Mars, Mars in Aries, Mars conjunct the Ascendant — these are described as markers of drive, ambition, physical vitality, and the capacity for decisive action. The people with strong Mars placements are told they are natural leaders, warriors, go-getters. What they are not typically told…
There is a difference between being alone and being lonely, and a further difference between circumstantial loneliness and the kind that persists regardless of circumstances. The person who is surrounded by people and still experiences profound isolation. The person who forms connections easily and finds none of them sustaining. The person whose relationships consistently disappoint…
Everyone is using the word narcissist now. It has become the shorthand for any difficult, self-absorbed, or hurtful partner — which means it has also become somewhat meaningless. But clinical narcissism, the actual psychological structure, is something specific. It has specific features, a specific internal architecture, and — in the chart — specific planetary configurations…
There is a specific quality that some people carry — not beauty exactly, not charm exactly, but something more visceral than either — that produces a specific response in others: the experience of being pulled toward someone before you have consciously decided to be. The person who makes others lose their thread, who generates an…
There is a difference between being careful with money and being incapable of parting with it. The first is a practical virtue. The second is a compulsion — one that isolates people, destroys relationships, and produces a life organized entirely around accumulation without any capacity for enjoyment of what has been accumulated. The chart describes…
Most astrology content focuses on the promising parts of a chart. The Jupiter placements. The Venus trines. The configurations that support love, success, and expansion. That content exists because it is pleasant to produce and pleasant to consume. This article is about the other end. Every chart contains both. And the configurations at the difficult…
Most people know their Sun sign. Some know their rising sign. Far fewer know their Moon sign — and almost everyone who discovers it has the same reaction: this is the one that actually describes me. The Sun sign describes who you are becoming — the conscious identity you are actively developing across a lifetime.…
This is one of the questions people bring to chart readings with the most emotional weight. Not always — sometimes people choose not to have children and are entirely at peace with that choice. But often the question arrives accompanied by years of trying, of grief, of a sense that something that should have happened…
One of the things I have noticed over twenty years of reading charts is that the advice people give each other about difficult emotions is almost always written for someone else’s Moon sign. “Just let it go.” “Stop overthinking.” “You need to talk about how you feel.” “Give yourself space, don’t ruminate.” These instructions are…
Genius is one of the most misused words in popular culture — applied to anyone competent, anyone successful, anyone whose work generates admiration. In astrology, the word means something more specific: the configuration of intelligence that goes beyond what ordinary intellectual talent can explain, that produces insights arriving as if from somewhere other than the…
