Mars Conjunct Venus

Transcript:

Hi everyone this is Acyuta-bhava from Nightlight Astrology. Happy Monday everybody. Today we are going to take a look at Mars is conjunction with Venus, which is sort of rare because usually it is going to be Venus that makes an aspect with Mars being the faster moving planet. But actually, Mars is moving faster right now and is about to catch Venus. So it's kind of an interesting situation. But we're going to talk about the Venus Mars conjunction today or the Mars Venus conjunction, I should say, see, it's like, I can't even think of another time where I've had to talk about Mars, applying to do something with Venus. But at any rate, that is our agenda for today. We're gonna do a little archetypal meditation on this combination. And then probably tomorrow, we'll take a look at the whole sign houses that the conjunction is happening in its interest interesting to take a look at that place, because there's been a lot happening in Capricorn for a while now. But the conjunction between Venus and Mars will also happen as the two planets are drawing closer to a conjunction with Pluto. So we'll probably take a look at those dynamics later in this week, if not tomorrow, and take a look at the whole sign house that you might be seeing the conjunction of the lovers taking place in, give you a better sense of how it's showing up. Today, we're looking at the archetypes.

So first, let us take a look at the real time clock. And just get a sense of what this conjunction looks like. By the way, Mercury is also about to switch over into Aquarius today. And when it changes signs, you know, you're going to be able to feel the difference moving from earthy Plutonian territory into airy, Saturnine territories will definitely feel the difference. If there's been heavier themes, especially, you know, mentally and in terms of what's being communicated what's been cropping up from the Plutonian depths, you probably going to see some of that die down at least on the Mercury front. But then we do have Venus and Mars heading towards Pluto, as well. So what's going to happen? Well, you can see that Mars and Venus are almost exactly conjoined at the 15th degree of Capricorn. Let's draw this along another day. So if we move this forward, one more day, you're going to see that Mars and Venus are now at 16 degrees and Mars is closing in getting even closer, move it forward. And by Wednesday of this week, you can see that Mars will actually surpass Venus, then what happens is the two of them are travelling together, you've got the two just two peas in a pod, kind of hanging out together here. And you can see that Mars is pulling ahead, but then Venus as speed is picking up. And so Venus is going to come back together. And Venus is going to be just following right on the heels of Mars. And the two planets are going to finally cross both cross Pluto, first of all, Mars Pluto conjunction around the early part of March, this is March 2nd into the 3rd, then Venus goes through the conjunction with Pluto on the third. And then the two of them are coming together. What I find really interesting is that then they cross over into Aquarius, and they can join in Aquarius, right about March 6th. So it's quite a long sequence that's coming up from Venus and Mars. Mars catches Venus, then they both pass through Pluto, then Venus catches Mars. What an interesting symbolic sequence to unpack right. So we'll be doing that starting this week by just talking about the lovers Aphrodite and Ares, the traditional names of the planets in ancient Greek astrology and, of course, their later Roman names being Venus and Mars. But let's take a look at them today, familiarise ourselves with them and some of the lessons that I think go along with such an archetypal conjunctions such as this.

First of all, I want to mention that there is something about this combination, the word that came to me was sublime. Because there's when you think about that word, oftentimes people off the top of their head are going to associate it with something great, lofty, romantic, beautiful, ecstatic. Something like that. When you have an exalted Mars in Capricorn, chasing Venus, and then conjoining with Venus goddess of love and beauty, there's something something lofty and sublime about that it feels. You know, especially it's Valentine's Day today, right? Happy Valentine's Day if you're celebrating the Hallmark, Hallmark holiday. And I'm mixed about it. I don't know how I feel about Valentine's day my wife and I always you know, Ashley, and I always celebrate we, you know, we go out for dinner or something. It's a good excuse to like, have a date night. But you know, it's kind of always just feel like it's a little gimmicky. I can get down, get down with Halloween. This just feels feels a little bit some something about Valentine's Day has never felt totally legit to me. Maybe I'm just cynical. But anyway, that's aside from my grouchy opinion, I hope you guys have a good one if you're enjoying it.

At any rate, this conjunction between the lovers brings to mind the feeling or quality of ecstasy and the sublime. And then I was reminded this morning while I was sitting here taking my notes of a chapter from well, you guessed it, James Hillman, who is obviously like, he is something of a guru to me, intellectually, I don't agree with him on everything. In fact, I depart with him in some pretty big ways on on certain things. But I just really love his writing. He has a chapter that at suddenly, as I was thinking of this word, and the exultation of Mars, chasing and conjoining Venus, in an edgy dark sign like Capricorn, I thought of the word sublime, because it's a complex word. Sublime could mean like there, if I think about sublime within the context of the Bhagavad Gita, for example, I think about Arjuna. He asks Krishna to reveal His universal form. And he reveals the universal form. And it's sublime, it's sort of huge and beautiful and terrifying, all at once. So it's an encapsulation of complex feelings and states of mind, that go together to create something that's beautiful. But also, it's big, and maybe even terrible, and terrifying. And I like those kinds of complicated dynamics, because I think they're more common than most people like to admit. And I feel like it's better to talk about them and get to know those complex states. Otherwise, we end up coming up with all sorts of poor ways of expressing them, we did try to cancel out the parts that we don't like in order to make sense of something we haven't spent enough time with, or we just pretend like they're not there.

At any rate, war is sublime. I want to read you a little excerpt from this essay, by James Hillman. This comes from a book that he wrote, called A Terrible Love of War. And it's a look at the archetypal reality of war, which is important because it's easy enough to say war is evil. War is bad. Yeah, but it exists. So What place does it have an existence. And that's important, it's important to understand, not that we have to condone everything or like everything, or not have moral feelings about something in creation. But it's important to understand why things exist at all, or what their archetypal significance is, which means what is their what is the enduring, eternal nature of the pattern? And what other patterns does it relate to, because one thing about archetypes is they never exist in a vacuum. They're always existing in relationship to other archetypes, Venus, although we think of Venus is the goddess and beauty and love Venus is also archetypically, about relationship about relating things together, which is why there's always going to be art, music, and expressions of culture, that try to marry complex and difficult aspects of human experience together, right, which is essentially what the marriage of Venus and Mars is about on a certain level. So let's read a little bit about this in this chapter called War is sublime. It's a little longer passage I'm going to skip around a little bit:

"We have not done with Mars and now we shall find him with his paramour, Venus war and love, battle and beauty entwined right at the beginning of Western fantasy two millennia before our era in Crete, Ares and Aphrodite are configured together. Then in Homer's Odyssey, you may read how they fell in love in the palace of her husband, the armoursmith Hephaistos. The son who sees all observes them in their illicit dalliance and tells the husband had Hephaistos, who is often depicted as a limping introverted sulky artisan, he immediately plots revenge. The offence must go to the core of his marriage for how can he with his deformity and heavy handed drudgery hold faithful Aphrodite, goddess of physical beauty and pleasure? She who authenticates the world of smiles and Geils promiscuity seductions sweet core to sons and the delights of the senses. In his workshop Hephaistos devises a net of chains woven of invisible filaments, and hangs them over the marriage bed, then pretending to leave the premises for one of his favourite retreats far away he hides. The Lovers seeing their chance rushed to the bed upon which the steel mesh falls. They cannot move not an arm not a leg caught in flagrante delicto. Hephaistos rages, shouts at them so loudly. After all, not only is she his wife, but Ares is his brother, both born of Hera, that all the gods gathered around that is save all that save all save the Goddesses whose modesty keeps them at home. The gods stand in the doorway observing, commenting, laughing if the gods are there, we are there to fur we are lived by forces we pretend to understand as Auden wrote, our attitudes and observations are informed by archetypal patterns. The gods laugh to see the helpless pair caught in the brilliant device of the insulted husband, as we are amused by Homer's clever device within this chapter of The Odyssey, except for some scholars who have found the story to be later inauthentic its insertion into the narrative declaring it scandalous, ridiculous in decent, their prissyness and acts the Goddesses whose sense of shame keeps them out of the story altogether. The gods speak among themselves about the bride price, and penalties owed Hephaistos for this violation. However, when Apollo asks Hermes how he would feel being an Ares place caught and exposed, Hermes said he would be glad to change places with Ares, allowing himself to be likewise on view for all to see if only he could lie with Aphrodite. Again, the gods break into laughter at Hermes brazen admission, except for Poseidon, whom laughter did not touch, and who sets out to write the wrong and end the matter by offering to pay the adultery debt in behalf of Ares to Hephaistos. This was done in the two lovers spring apart from each to a distant land

"What is this magnetic attraction? What does love find in war? What beauty does battle afford? What does their copulation mean? To pursue these questions, we have to take our cue from Hermes, who among the gods is the one able to enter the image with imagination, taking the fantasy further by placing himself in it, caught by it and willing to be foolishly exposed. To be caught in the tail makes it psychological, which helps explain why Hermes is often called a psychopompous, a guide of psyche. The tale is not merely another story about the gods which the ancient world could spin out and listen to endlessly. It tells not only about them, but also about us, not merely their mythology, but our psychology. The characters in myths portray the characteristics of human nature and psychology is mythology and contemporary dress. So when the Goddesses won't even show up, won't even consider the possibility that there can be beauty coupled with the savagery of war, their denial repeats our shamefaced embarrassment over our fascinations, with war films with weapons of mass destructions, with pictures of blasted bodies and bombs bursting in air. Apollo looks but with a distant haughtiness, disengaging himself by asking opinions, Poseidon looks to but he is morally affronted a surprising response in view of the fact that he is a major chaser in Greek myth with offspring father through a wicked variety of populations and violations. He is not at all amused, he becomes sanctimonious legalistic. Is this to not a familiar reaction? Do we not try to draw fixed lines between battle and beauty, so as to keep our violence violent and our love loving?

"In short, this little tale of gossip and titillation exposes ways of resistance to and participation in the love of war. Understanding the fusion between beauty and violence, terror and love, the terrible love of war is precisely our task. The distinctions between Mars and Venus, Ares and Aphrodite as opposites and the reason for their mutual attractions as opposites is easy enough. This nature seems so radically different that this pair is a familiar themes in poems and paintings through centuries. Mars hersuit, Venus smooth, Mars, fiery brash, savage and red, Venus watery, pale, receptive and secretive. Mars armoured and shielded with earthbound feet, Venus, unclothed, vulnerable, lightly grounded blood to iron rams and horses, roses, pearls waterfowl and doves. Mars is the god of rhetorical speed galloping along and dactils while beauty lingers and because it satisfies duty arrests motion according to St. Thomas. Thus they balance each other in a compensatory system of mutual consent. chord each fulfilling a gap in the other expressed allegorically in the child of their union Harmonia.

[By the way, that word Harmonia was also used to express the idea of greater cosmic harmony as a principle.]

"Great idols of war are supposedly given two Venusian pleasures Caesar and Napoleon for instance, and Nelson to Cleopatra, Josephine and Lady Hamilton are essentially the heroes legends. Great novels of war seem to call on Venus for their aesthetic satisfaction, A Farewell to Arms For Whom the Bell Tolls, War and Peace. The Trojan War arises from the seduction of beauty. Caesars accounts mentioned the impediments of camp followers, and he goes on describing all this different great literary history of Mars and Venus being coupled together and stories of war. Understanding the pair's opposites is too easy even we should suffer. Even should we sophisticate opposition into its various logics, contrasts. contraries contradictory is complements alternatives polarities reciprocals. Or bring them together as coterminous and corelevant with each other. They remain distinct identities without inherent connection, we still have not got to the internal necessity of the coupling of love and war. Perhaps our habitual mind can't think otherwise. We are schooled to believe that understanding results from definition, each item clear and distinct. We have such hard edge minds that we escaped their narrow confines by falling happily religiously, for fanciful scientific descriptions of fuzzy sets, indeterminacy and uncertainty black holes warps and waves and chaos. Perhaps our Western Christian literalism takes each thing by its word and for what it is and not something else. Mars is war and Venus is love and never the do can merge. We seem able to think only in accord with our beliefs. atomisticcally, monotheistically, each thing to itself with a distinct identity, so locked into live nets, self enclosed monads and Aristotle's logic of either or that we are unable to follow Hermes into the bed of that image. That bed that image belongs in the house of Hephaistos in a mythical construct a mythical cosmos of polytheistic imagination, never believed me to the gods appear alone wrote Schiller.

"We prefer to imagine them each standing like statues in a museum quite separated with descriptive labels explaining their traits and domains but they don't stand still and their domains overlap, since they are necessarily implicated in one another and complicated by one another. In fact, says when complication rather than explication is the preferred method of polytheistic. Understanding the pagan divinities are not merely polytheistic because there are so many of them a multiplicity of distinct units, they are multiple in essence, unable to be separated out from the multiplicity of their localities, their appearances, their names and their internal confluence with their peers. polytheism is necessary to their nature in hearing in their images, each is always all Mars and Venus are always in the bed of the image. Even when the tale says they fly off and away from each other. They remain an inseparable archetypal conjunction."

A few nice little passages where he mentions he shows elements of their presence in war.

"The Goddess in the arms of Ares makes her presence known mainly by aestheticizing. A moonlit night, full of fragrance of the rose gardens, remembers Muggeridge, a young German near Vodoun in 1915 writes the moon shone into my mug, only now and then a bullet whistled through the trees. It was the first time I had noticed that there can be some beauty in war that it had its poetic side."

He goes on to talk about other really beautiful images in the midst of war.

"Human beings love their weapons, crafting them with the skills of ffice joson the beauty of Aphrodite for the purposes of Ares, consider how many different kinds of blades edges points, metals and temporary rings are fashioned on the variety of knives swords, spears, sabres, dirks, battle axes, stilettos, rapiers tridents, daggers, cutlasses, scimitars, Lance's pointers, Pike's halberds, that have been lovingly honed with the aim of killing. We keep them As revered objects display old battle tanks and cannon in front of the Town courthouses convert battleships and submarines into museums through which tourists stream on Sundays, build gun cabinets in our home trade weapons, it's at Sotheby's How foolish to believe we can enforce licencing and regulation. No society can truly suppress Venus."

And he's not an anti gun control, in a sense, but he has this whole chapter or this whole section where he talks about one thing that people who would like to see healthier laws or rules regarding guns, which is a hot debate topic in our country right now. He says, you know, basically, it comes down to understanding that, if you if you can't see the love of weapons that people have and understand the aesthetic, almost artistic, draw that people have two weapons, that there's a sense of art, beauty, that there's an imaginative draw to weapons, that has Venus embedded in it. And that's not going away anytime soon, the love of weapons, the design of weapons, the memorialization of warfare, unless you can understand their aesthetic appeal and the human imagination, you're not just going to get rid of it by appealing to morality. That's really the point of that passage. I'm not trying to tell you what you should or shouldn't think about gun control. I'm just saying it's an interesting passage and an interesting thing to consider overall.

Throughout that book, most of what he does is to show us the way that Venus and Mars are coupled together, far more than we would like to believe. I imagine, for example, I was just sitting downstairs with with my daughter the other night, and we were watching. I'm trying to remember what were we watching? Now? We watched the newest Ghostbusters movie. And she said, Daddy, we need to turn off all the lights. And I didn't want to turn off all the lights. They knew it would scare her. I said, you know, it's a little I don't know how scary this movie is. We're gonna have to close your eyes at some point. If it's too scary. I have to turn it off. Like it was a big night. It was kind of a big deal. Right? So and she said, Yeah, but I it's part of it, you have to turn off the lights to scary movie. And I was just noticing how Venus and Mars were together in her desire to be scared to have a beautiful aesthetic experience of this scary movie in the dark, totally absorbed, the noises, the sounds, the colours on the TV. She wanted to totally immerse herself in an artistic experience an aesthetic experience of scariness.

And it's a microcosm for what Venus and Mars are really all about, that did that the darker, edgier, more dramatic, controversial, provocative elements of the human psyche are joined very closely to, to what we find beautiful. And I'm not trying to glorify anything dark or anything that's morally repugnant. But it we you can't just moralise your way through the universe. The universe requires aesthetic honesty. And we have to be willing to look at what we love and what we are attracted to if we are to grow in understanding, you can't preemptively moralise your way through a life that will appeal to you, in many different ways, many that are very complicated and often paradoxical. And that's what Venus and Mars is really all about in some ways.

Let's take a look at the etymology of the word sublime. The word means expressing lofty ideas in an elevated manner, or from the Latin uplifted high born aloft, exalted, eminent, distinguished, sloping upward along a threshold. Right, interesting. So when I think of the sublime, and I think about Venus and Mars, what I think about is the way in which the complicated when the complicated dark elements of life, whether it's our desires, or our faults, or our secret sins, or whatever it might be the edgier, darker, more potentially shameful elements of human life. When they're paired with Venus in the psyche, when we're really being honest. There's this way in which they reach up out of the trappings of our life and our egos and our faults or victories or triumphs or moral successes or failures. They go up somewhere else, and they become something that points us toward a threshold beyond the trappings of this world. I know my daughter wanted to have an experience of darkness that took her out of this world. And that something like that could be beautiful even in the mind of a six year old. Who by the way, if you ever noticed little children also love fairy tales. And if you've ever noticed fairy tales are incredibly dark in certain ways. If you ever read The Little Mermaid, like oh my god. But in Jung pointed this out to in many in the Jungian tradition have talked about this quite a bit. Fairy tales are often dark, they are often instructive, but they all they have a way of blending together images that are dark and beautiful and that touch on something that children very easily understand and need and actually want. Now it's it's safe to say you don't want to bombard your kids with too many images TV you know, you don't you don't want to mess your kids up. But I will tell you that since my daughter's been like I'd say three or four years old, she's loved fairy tales, and you know, like Rumplestiltskin, Hansel and Gretel many others too.

Why do we need those things? Why do we need some aesthetic experience of those things? Because we're always seeking for the sublime redemption, that thing that takes the ordinary, the mundane, the dark aspects of everyday life and elevates them into this sphere of beauty. And not just beauty but truth that there's something true about these complexities.

So noticing the shadow is a part of what happens when Mars exalted Mars overpack takes over Venus, noticing that there are dark elements that need satisfying and dark is not the same as bad. Dark is not the same as immoral and dark is not the same as evil. So it's important to be in touch with what darkness is in us. How can it have some healthy aesthetic recognition in us otherwise? We know that when we tried to deny, repress, suppress, oppress, it's usually coming from the fact that we haven't spent enough time getting to know those complexities that live in us the shadow and light that lives in us. If we don't know it, then it tends to express itself in ways that are very destructive.

Notice the shadow take time to notice it. That's something I wrote down. The shadow is always there in what we love, without exception, what we want, what we desire, what we love, what we value, what we're proud of. Take time, it's a really fun exercise. Take a piece of paper or a Word document or something. Write down not abstract things, but worldly things embodied things that I love people that I love things that I love places that I love. Write them down and just write down what you love about them. And then go back through the same list and say, Where's the shadow? What's the darkness? What where does the darkness exist in these things, be brutally honest about it. Not judgmental, just honest. Take time to notice the shadow there in the things that we desire that we're attached to that we love that we crave. It doesn't make us bad to recognise the shadow. The only thing that we could be afraid of is being a hypocrite if we don't spend time with and are not aware of the shadow and hypocrite What does hypocrite mean? So looking at the etymology I love looking at etymology is one of my favourite things. Humility

I'm literally on the ground. Literally on the ground. That's one of the early meanings is something that is on the ground. The virtue of humility being on the ground How about this word? hypocrisy? Oops, hold on just a second. I gotta pull it up an imitation of someone else's speech and gestures. The sin of pretending to be virtuous acting on a stage Isn't that those are good hypocrisy to answer a fellow actor on a stage to play a part, see most of the time. The sin isn't that there's shadow mingling with light, in our everyday lives, in our relationships, in our desires, in our job, in our work in our bodies in our inner dialogue. It's not that it's a sin that that darkness is there. It's a sin that we pretend like it's not, and then act some kind of part. We pretend that we're virtuous. And to be virtuous is more, you could, we could say is more about trying to be your best self while constantly staying humble. And being honest about the commingling of light and dark qualities within ourselves. It's like, don't go far from the the tooth and nail of your own existence. Like don't go too far from it. Because it's the very thing if you're in touch with that allows your yes to be yes and your no to be no, it allows your virtue to be unpretentious. It allows your attempt at any kind of goodness to be humble while also having an appreciation for the sublime. You have your feet on the ground, you are an earthy citizen, you understand your humanity. But you also stay rooted in it because it's the best place to look up at the heavens and witness the sublime from that these opposites exist within me in some beautiful way that I can't fathom keeps me unpretentious. It keeps me from acting apart. It keeps me in touch with the sublime, all of which is the basis of humility. So remember, hypocrisy, acting apart, pretending to be virtuous, imitating speech and gestures that we have some sense of this is good. This is right. And one of the reasons that I think that a lot of people, there's a huge backlash against what is perceived as PC culture, I don't think it really has to do with the issues. Observing this over years now, on social media, from the standpoint of archetypal psychology, I don't think it's ultimately at least on one level, I don't think it's about the issues any issue per se. I think it is about the perceived hypocrisy or self righteousness, or it's about the perceived sense of moral, puritanical, high ground, that disgusts people who are regularly interacting with or trying to come to terms with the commingling of light and dark in life in the psyche and everyday life. There's something offensive about the moral high ground, if we're really honest about it, because who can hold it? You know what I'm saying? That doesn't mean that morality can't exist. And it doesn't mean that any issue isn't very, very important. But I think that's probably why you see some of that backlash. Just broadly, culturally speaking, I'm not talking about any particular issue. I have heard more in the past three or four years of my life than at any other time in my life, people talking about, you know, what is politically correct, what is offensive, what is not offensive. And, again, I aside from any individual issue that might be at play within that conversation, all of which to me are probably extremely relevant, you know, to have discussions about but I think one of the if I stand back, and I try to understand why, why is there such division? Why is there one popular thing that people are saying, which is that, oh, well, I feel like nothing you can say or do is right or correct anymore, or you're always in danger of offending someone or it feels like you're walking on eggshells, and there's this anger about it. I think at least in part, we can understand that part of that is going to come from the fact essentially, we don't like hypocrisy and hypocrisy is very, very easy to fall into. It's probably the most important thing to stay aware of in everyday life. And that is exactly what Ares and Aphrodite story is about, that they are lovers that they are in the bed of every image, and that the conjunction between the dark and the light that they love each other somehow is at the heart of the of all divisions and conflicts really. That what we resist or don't like or want to reject that there is often secret love hidden that we haven't yet are articulated or gotten in touch with.

I like the phrase humility is not thinking less of yourself but thinking about yourself less. I've always really liked that phrase. Humility is not thinking less of yourself but thinking about yourself less. Being in touch with the shadow and light helps us to be aware of our hypocrisy. It does not eliminate hypocrisy, it makes us aware of it and being aware of the fact that there is a hypocritical dimension to life a dimension in which we're always trying to act virtuously, when in fact, we're not, you know, we're not virtuous you that that's really what that's really the basis of humility is to just try to stay aware of our own hypocrisy. And I think any issue that really needs to be talked about where some awareness needs to be raised can be done in a manner that is not hypocritical. That is not puritanical, or self righteous. And I think I think it ought to be done that way. Personally, the only way that anything gets done like that in my own life is if I stay in touch with my own hypocrisy, starting with me nowhere else right. Um, humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking less of yourself thinking about your own goodness less and embracing your own polytheistic nature that is to say that the ground of your divine soul plays host to shadow and light to shadows and lights. And that love is this sublime thing that somehow draws all of these complexities together and makes them sweet. Makes them so sweet that you don't want to take any kind of stand about it. It makes you a quiet, you realise if I'm too loud about the sweetness I risk it, it taking off and leaving me anything loud and anything that's that declares too loudly with some sense of victory. The conjunction of Mars and Venus will call all of the gods in the net will be thrown over and there will be there will be problems.

But what does Hermes do? Hermes is the one God who admits the hypocrisy of all the other gods standing there judging and laughing at ares and Aphrodite? Oh, look, turns out that darkness and light love each other. Haha. Yeah, that's what we all thought, you know? And aren't they just elicit lovers? Isn't Venus just so inconsistent for loving Mars? And isn't Mars just so inconsistent for loving Venus? And Mercury, the God who can go either way, who goes both ways, the psychopomp, the guide of the soul, the hermetic alchemical goal of spiritual spirituality and astrology itself says, You know what, guys? I'd love to be there with Venus too. He's the only one who can admit, yeah, there's complications here and you know, I actually kind of like them. That's the guide of the soul speaking, the only one who's willing to admit to His own hypocrisy within that image within that bed, I'm there too.

So notice what needs to come together in your life right now, you may notice lots of things coming together. But agreements can be forged synthesis, union harmonisation of disparate pieces. All those are the practical ways in which we might see Venus and Mars coming together right now, the most fundamentally, are you spending enough time? Am I spending enough time sitting down and saying, Here's what I love. And where's the shadow in what I love? Here are the shadows in my life list all of your shadows, just make a list of 10 shadows. And then right next to it put, what's the love? What's the beauty inherent in the image? Do this and we get to the core of why Venus loves Mars and Mars loves Venus, although they are opposites. And although we can just as easily be polarised and troubled and conflicted by them.

So at any rate, I hope that this was useful, and that you guys have some good things to think about. With regard to this archetypal pairing, I think what we'll do is we'll probably do another episode where we break down Venus and Mars through whole sign houses and give you a little bit more practical, grounded way of looking at where these planets are showing up in your birth charts right now. That's it for today. I hope you guys have a good one. Happy Valentine's Day if you are celebrating, and we'll talk to you later. Bye