The Lovers Meet: Venus Conjunct Mars in Aquarius This Week

Hey everyone, this is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology. Happy Monday, everybody. Today, we're going to take a look at one of the biggest transits of the week, and that is the conjunction of Venus and Mars in the sign of Aquarius.

So, these two planets are coming together in the sign of Aquarius this week to conjoin. That dance will be happening all week; both planets are also moving into a square with Jupiter. This is probably the headline of the week. But there are a few other things we'll be looking at as the week goes on. That's what we're going to start today.

So before we get into it, don't forget to like and subscribe, and share your comments and reflections. We'd love to hear from you guys. As always, it's really nice to create a community around these posts by hearing your stories.

I have a grabbed episode in queue. But we have had so many aspects, so many big powerful aspects day after day after day, just loads of them that I'm just waiting for a bit of a lull in the action, that those episodes are very good for the kind of the winter doldrums when there's just like four or five days where there's not really any trends that are going on, and I'm always looking for content to use during this time. So you will have a great grabbed episode coming up. As soon as I feel like that's the space that's open for it.

Anyway, you can find a transcript of any of my daily talks, including today, on the website nightlightastrology.com. I want to take you over there because we had a very successful and very fun first meeting last week to look at the presence of Pluto in love and relationships.

If you go over to my website, nightlightastrology.com, and you click on the events page, go to live events. If you're on the homepage, just click the Live Events tab there; it'll take you to these upcoming live events. You'll see that in March on the 14th, from 7pm to 9pm. So, a couple of weeks away yet, we're moving on to the next part in the series called Neptune in Love. Now, you don't have to have seen the first one to see this one.

Of course, the first one will be available to purchase in the shop. So you can pick it up there if you want to get the replay. The shop page is not up as of the time I'm recording this, but it will be shortly, and then the webinar registration for Neptune in Love will be looking at Neptune in the significations of Neptune in love and relationships in the birth chart and by transit, how to work with this kind of energy when it's coming into your life where we were born with it.

It's a really, really good series to be looking at the outer planets in love and relationships, and then you'll see in April, if you scroll down, we're going to do Uranus in love as well. So you get the replay. If you can't attend live, the link is sent to you. So you can download it to your device and watch it later if you can't make it live. Hopefully, we'll see some of you there for this next installment in this new series. I'm doing so anyway; if you have any questions, email us at info@nightlightastrology.com.

All right, so let's look at the real-time clock, and as always, let's get a feel for what's happening first. So you can see here the lovers are coming together, and this is by Wednesday, February 21. So it's a big transit happening this week, and you'll see that they hit that six-degree mark together on the same degree, which puts them into a three-degree engagement range with Jupiter in Taurus, which is the other major aspect that will be happening this week are these planets going into the square.

So we see that Venus crosses over Mars between Wednesday, February 21, and Thursday, February 22. So if you give it just a little bit more time, then you're going to see them kind of getting out of that three-degree range of separation. Not until you know, in the middle of next week. So they're really kind of hanging out together for a little while.

Now, the other thing that's happening is you can see here between Saturday, February 24, and Sunday, the 25th. Venus will head through a square to Jupiter, and then Mars will follow suit. Mars will start hitting the square to Jupiter by Monday of next week. So, really, they're both heading into the square over the weekend. So we'll be covering that square a little bit more at the end of this week. But yeah, both planets coming together in conjunction and Aquarius, and the other thing that's interesting is if we sort of back up and look at their conjunction, which happens just after the seventh degree, so that puts them interestingly just over the edge into the bound of Venus.

So these two planets will come together right in the boundary of Venus a certain number of degrees in Aquarius that Venus has rulership in. This is nice because it gives us a little bit more of a Venusian flavor and then Wodi dodi. Wodi Dodi, we have the square coming into Jupiter, who's in Venus's domicile. Right? We've got the Sun and Saturn, and Venus is exultation and bound. We've got Mercury about to enter Venus is bound and exultation.

So again, if you've been watching my channel For the past while now, you may have noticed that lately, I've been emphasizing how much underlying power Venus has in the sky; these dignities help us to see that. So, with that in mind, this is not just your normal Venus-Mars conjunction where the lovers are on equal footing. No, no, Venus has a bit more power in the sky right now.

So that does change how we're going to look at things this week, and it will play a role in how I continue to delineate this for us as the week goes on. But we're not going to do any galaxy brain stuff. Today. We're just purely going to talk about the archetypal combination of Venus and Mars in general to start the week, and then as we go on, we'll galaxy brain our way into some of the finer details and nuances; we might throw a couple of parallel cards and maybe an I-Ching reading, just to accent what we're looking at and look at some of the dignities a little bit more. But this is a good place to start.

So, in order to start here, I want to read you guys something, and then, by the way, I'm still getting over my cold; this is like the world's longest cold, and it's funny, it's like, in Minnesota every winter like once a winter I get a cold, it's just like without fail.

When I was a kid, I grew up here; since I've moved back, our third or fourth year back anyway, I've always gotten a winter cold, and the funniest thing is I never have to end up treating it with anything it just goes away on its own dose up lots of herbs that actually gives me an all the good stuff, and you know, just kind of nurture myself through it.

I swear to God, this is the longest cold I've had in years. It's just so stubborn. It's like sticky, you know? And so anyway, with me sharing that please do not offer tons of unsolicited medical or herbal advice in the comment section. Anytime you ever mentioned you have a cold on YouTube, people are like, well, let me tell you, so annoying. No offense to anyone; I'm sure you really care about me, which is nice, but I'm not asking for any advice.

I just think it's interesting that they're like in our overall here in Minnesota like it seems to be that this is the winter of unusually long-lasting colds, like three to four weeks where you just have the ongoing like you can do stuff I can get stuff done I can do my work I can even work out it's not like you know drained of energy but just like kind of nagging symptoms like runny nose, little bit of a sore throat not major blah, blah, blah. It just goes on and on. It's like, oh my god. Anyway, I feel like I'm on the mend, though. So, this is a good start to the week compared to where I was the last two weeks.

Anyhow, alright, so I want to read you guys something that comes from a book by James Hillman called A Terrible Love of War. He is, as you guys know, one of my soul guides in this life, his ideas, his work, his writing. He is largely responsible for the founding of what is often called archetypal psychology, which is a little bit of a spin-off of the depth psychology movement that came from Jung, who, in turn, was sort of a contemporary of Freud.

Many of the best modern astrologers would consider themselves archetypal astrologers who align themselves on some level with the way that Hillman looked at archetypes. Also, like, you know, Liz Greene was a contemporary of Hillman. So they, I think they studied together in Zurich, at the Jung Institute, and Richard Tarnas, obviously, I actually went to a weekend-long series that he hosted at Pacifica, where he taught on the life and work of James Hillman over the whole weekend and related a lot of it to his astrological career.

So, some of our most important modern archetypal and psychological astrologers would put Hillman right up there as one of the most prominent influences on their work. I fall in that same category. I've written about him in a few astrological magazines. I've done presentations on his work in relation to astrology at astrological conferences.

So, just in case you're new to my channel, and you're like, why are you always reading James Hillman? That's why he has a very pivotal role to play in the history of modern astrology. His son is a great astrologer; I interviewed him and talked to him about his father and his sons as astrologers as well. Anyway, his work is rich; if you ever want to get into it, A Terrible Love of War by him is one of my favorite books.

In this, he talks about the need to understand war as a Mars signification, for example, in relation to love and beauty, because the two throughout history are rather inseparable as archetypes and so that on its own is controversial, hence the title A Terrible Love of War. But the point is not to glorify war, as much as it is to help understand the archetypal dyad of Venus and Mars in the way that love and love and beauty and terror and war are often inseparably joined to one another on various levels.

So that's what we're going to look at today. Among other things, we're going to tease out how the conjunction of the two planets, which means their fusion, when you fuse Mars and Venus together, how do they show up in our lives, psychology, relationships, or jobs. I want to read you a few passages just briefly.

This is from chapter three of the book called War is Sublime.

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 config-
ured together in Knossos and in Gortnya and Dreros. 1 Then, in
Homer's Odyssey (book 8), you may read how they fell in love in
the palace of her husband, the armorer-smith, Hephaistos.

The Sun, who sees all, observes them in their illicit dalliance,
and tells the husband~ Hephaistos, who is often depicted as a limping, introverted, sulky artisan. He immediately plots revenge. The
offense 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 guiles, promiscuity, seductions, sweet courtesans, 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 favorite retreats far away, he hides. The lovers, seeing their chance, rush to the bed, upon which the steel mesh falls. They cannot move, not an arm, not a leg, caught in flagrante delicto.

Hephaistos enrages, 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 gather around, that is, all save the goddesses, whose
modesty keeps them at home. The gods stand in the doorway, ob-
serving, commenting, laughing. If the gods are there, we are there
too, for 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 a later inauthentic insertion into the narrative, declaring it "scandalous, ridiculous, indecent." Their prissiness enacts 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 in Ares' place, caught
and exposed, Hermes says 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 right the wrong and end the matter by offering to
pay the adultery debt in behalf of Ares to Hephaistos. This was
done, and the two lovers spring apart, 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 tale makes it psychological, which helps ex-
plain why Hermes is often called a psychopompos, guide of psyche.
The tale is not merely another story about the gods which the an-
cie nt 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 in contemporary
dress. So, when the goddesses won't even show up, won't even con-
sider the possibility that there can be beauty coupled with the savagery of war, their denial repeats our shamefaced embarrassment
over our fascination with war films, with weapons of mass destruction, with pictures of blasted bodies and bombs bursting in air.

Apollo looks, but with a distant hauteur, disengaging himself by
asking opinions. Poseidon looks too, but he is morally affronted, a
surprising response in view of the fact that he is a major chaser in
Greek myth, with offspring fathered through a wicked variety of
copulations and violations. He is not at all amused. He becomes
sanctimonious, legalistic. Is this too 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 oppo-
sites, and the reason for their mutual attraction as opposites is easy enough. Their natures seem so radically different that this pair is a
familiar theme in poems and paintings through centuries. Mars hirsute, Venus smooth. Mars fiery, brash, savage, and red; Venus wa-
tery, pale, receptive, and secretive. Mars armored and shielded with
earthbound feet; Venus unclothed, vulnerable, lightly grounded.

Blood, iron, rams, and horses; roses, pearls, waterfowl, and doves.
Mars is the God of rhetorical speed, galloping along in dactyls and
anapests, while beauty lingers and, because it satisfies, beauty ar-
rests motion, according to St. Thomas. Thus they balance each
other in a compensatory system of mutual concord, each fulfilling a
gap in the other, expressed allegorically in the child of their union,
Harmonia.

Great idols of war are supposedly given to Venusian pleasure,
Caesar and Napoleon for instance, and Nelson too. Cleopatra,
Josephine, and Lady Hamilton are essential to the heroes' legends.
Great novels of war seem to call on Venus for their aesthetic satis-
faction: A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, War and Peace. The
Trojan War arises from the seduction of beauty. Caesar's accounts
mention the impedimenta of camp followers. Elizabethan verse em-
ploys swordplay, and battle as major tropes for the thrust and parry
and final conquest of lovers tangled in the hay. Love lyrics speak of
"killing" beauty, "slain" by beauty, of heart-stopping beauty much
as American teenagers were wont to use the description of "drop-
dead" for a gorgeous boy or girl who took your breath away. Even
when Mars and Venus make conflicting claims they remain paired,
as in Carmen: a soldier's duty deserted for his body's passion and
it can be vice versa: the body's passion deserted for the call of duty.
Insuperable alternatives are simply another mode of pairing: ~'Make
Love, Not War." Relief and recreation of the combat soldier-from
battle to brothel to battle again.

Understanding the pair as opposites is too easy. Even should we
sophisticate opposition into its various logics-contrasts, contraries, contradictories, 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

He's asking us to think about Mars and Venus Love and War is more than just opposed opposites. He's trying to get us to think about them as interwoven parts of the same which is very much what a conjunction of Venus and Mars is.

Perhaps, our habitual mindset can't think otherwise. We are
schooled to believe that understanding results from definitions, each
item clear and distinct. We have such hard-edge minds that we es-
cape 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 Chris-
tian 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 twain
can merge). We seem able to think only in accord with our beliefs,
atomistically, monotheistically, each thing to itself with a distinct
identity, so locked into Leibniz's self-enclosed monads and Aristotle's logic of either! or that we are unable to follow Hermes into
the bed of the image.

So beautiful, so poetic.

That bed, that image, belongs in the house of Hephaistos, in a
mythical construct in a mythical cosmos of a polytheistic imagina-
tion. "Never, believe me, do the Gods appear alone;' wrote Schiller
during the German Romantic revival of the ancient myths, "never
alone," from which Edgar Wind draws the principle "that it is a
mistake to worship one god alone." Our present plain style of
single-minded unambiguity fails to grasp the "mutual entailment"
(Wind) of mythical configurations. 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 im-
plicated in one another and complicated by one another. In fact,
says Wind, 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 the internal confluence with their peers.
Polytheism is necessary to their natures, inhering in their images;
each is always all.

Really important for understanding the entire landscape of polytheistic pagan archetypal thinking that was present at the dawn of horoscopic astrology.

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. Where Mars is Venus will be.
Love and beauty, seduction, glamour, and pleasure, intimacy, and
softness shall accompany Mars wherever he goes. These camp fol-
lowers belong to his battle train. The world of war's horror and fear
is also a world of desire and attraction. We have come to another
place where understanding our subject is again most baffled: war's
beautiful horror, its terrible love and exhilarating fusion called the
sublime.

I take my first notion of the sublime from a line in Words-
worth's Prelude: " ... and r grew up / Fostered alike by beauty and
by fear." And from the fearful symmetry of Blake's "Tyger":

THE TYGER (condensed)
Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? 'what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
(WILLIAM BLAKE)

I wanted to start us with that reading today because what Hillman is pointing out is that one of our biggest problems when it comes to any kind of conjunction of planets is the tendency we have to both learn, study, and think about astrology in terms of things existing in solitary lists of adjectives, right like Mars, war, conflict, heat, courage, battle, being assertive, etc. But they never exist that way. They never exist purely alone. Is there any a time in the sky when the sky is not a collection of planets seeing one another by means of the aspectual lines of sight by means of whole sign houses, by means of their parallels and conjunctions with fixed stars, or outer planets or asteroids or what have you.

So, planets are part of a polytheistic ancient world imagination that, by its nature, is about community and relationships, blending and mingling of archetypes, which is how we actually experience archetypes. That is why a big focus of my channel is to take the archetypes combined blend and turn them and turn them and turn them so that you're always thinking about them in slightly different ways.

Stereotypes exist in that turning, but they tend to be the default way we think about and talk about, rather than only one way. That's basically the definition of an astrological stereotype; it's usually not wrong. It's just limited insofar as it becomes the de facto bottom line or the thing we go back to over and over, which in the long run will keep us very limited in our ability to delineate and think and see and be astrological in our lives.

So what I love about Hillman's work is he's always turning the jewels of the archetypes and helping us see the way in which they are interrelated; there is no better time to see the interrelationship of two archetypes than when they can join in the sky. Because the conjunction was actually not an aspect to ancient astrologers, it didn't fall into the category of an aspect, and that is because, in all aspects, you have, okay, so sextile on the right and left-hand side of aspects, you got a sextile got to trine, you've got a square on both sides, and then you have an opposition, seven lines of sight for the seven traditional planets.

Then you have a virgin's places that signs, sign whole signs and planets and these whole signs, don't see one another and so forth, and in that collection of aspects, everything is related to either through the opposition in terms of archetypal opposition, polarity duality, where the two are opposed and very distinct, and you'll often get more of the feeling of them being opposites in a kind of grudge match.

Of course there's always the potential for fusion with opposition's but it's why it's called considered a hard aspect of the nature of sets added, and then all the other aspects, you're always going to have a superior and inferior planet where one planet is sort of asserting or inflicting its nature upon the other where you have an active and a passive planet in a relationship.

So you get one that's kind of more dominant than the other. There's no aspect like the conjunction in this regard, where the two archetypes blend and become as one. They are inseparable, and you'll feel and notice they're mingling juxtapositions. It's, you'll notice them in a way that's very different from an opposition because it's like, as Hillman is saying, there's always a way in which archetypes that even though they seem opposed, and Venus and Mars are because they rule opposite signs, Taurus, and Scorpio, Aries, and Libra, that you will often think of them as opposites and insofar as we only learn things in a vacuum, and we think of archetypes as opposites, and so forth, where our imagination is going to be incredibly limited, and our sense of humor most of the time, by the way. But anyway.

So, all of that being said, Hillman is asking us to consider Venus and Mars not as opposites but as co-present archetypes that are fused with each other frequently in our experiences and in life. It's very uncomfortable for us, especially when it comes to a topic like war, which is why his book is, to my mind, one of the most provocative things ever and interesting things ever written about the subject of war. It asks us to consider some of the major shadows that we don't see present in why war exists and why it keeps it continues to have some kind of place in the world, even though most of us find it to be sort of a sick, not so good place, right?

Anyway, so again, this is not to glorify war, right? It's not the point. The point is to explore the other kinds of archetypes that can be fused into Mars, especially Aphrodite and Venus. So, the lovers meeting in Aquarius this week, from an archetypal point of view, let's turn the jewel.

Let's think about desire; first of all, it is something that really can be of the nature of Venus or Mars; it's a matter of how we get something that we want. I want something that I don't have that I believe will satisfy me. Okay, so I can go out and actively pursue it Mars, or I can try to magnetically attracted Venus, just different ways of talking about desire.

Desire when Venus and Mars think about desire, one of the things that comes up is that desire is often born out of conflict or has a very strong relationship with conflict. Why is that? Because if I don't have something that I want, and I have to actively pursue it, usually, I'm going to engage in the exertion of my will and a kind of struggle, and that struggle will usually bring up conflicts either within me or within the world.

Maybe because there's scarce, there's scarcity, other people want the same thing, and only some people can have it, and other people cannot. Or there's work and effort involved, and perseverance and trials and frustrations and sacrifice. These are all very Marzy. Mars was not scared to peel off a little bit of its arm and throw it to the sacrificial fire to get something that it wants, and so anytime we think about the most beautiful things we desire and the things that we believe will satisfy us most and give us the most happiness, a very Venusian image, you can't really separate it from some level of conflict, pain, suffering, this is also why the joys of Mars and Venus in the traditional houses are paired next to one another, the sixth, mala fortuna bad fortune, Mars, a place of sacrifice and hard work and effort to get what you want, kind of relentless and, difficult, you know.

Venus, the place of good fortune and the fifth, associated with Venus and the place of good things coming, you know, an enjoyable satiating things, desire and conflict go together, and it's not that that's not a good or bad thing. It's just a thing.

What we can do, though, is we can become more aware of it, we can become more aware of what desires create, what kind of conflict, sacrifice, perseverance, work, will, and we can reflect on, you know, is that something that's really making us happy? Sometimes, we spend a lot of time engaging in the effort and the conflict related to our desires. Maybe we could take a step back and, like, be more content with what we have, you know, less driven by what we don't into the war, what we want.

Now, each of us is being sent to war over a beautiful maiden in this respect, just like in fairy tales. It's it's so mundane. We don't think about it that way. But that's what it is. There's nothing wrong with that.

Also, there are some things that you want, that you desire, that are beautiful, that you have to work for, that you have to suffer for, that you have to go to metaphorical battle over, and we enjoy it, and the thing is to be real about the fact that we enjoy it and that it's, we love adventures, especially when they're connected to things we desire.

You could desire to be a great musician; you're gonna have to suffer to get there, suffering with passion. That's a Mars thing. Passion, means to suffer alongside of something that you carry with the love. The Passion of the Christ, you'll hear that said, too, right.

So anyway, so just becoming more aware of the pairing of desire and conflict. Think about all of the, I mean, think about the kind of douchey-est; grossest image of some guys fighting over a girl, like it's that, but it's more than that. Two can be much more beautiful than that, and it says sort of there are base images associated with the combination that kind of repugnant morally, and then there are others that are just so every day, I want to read, you know, talking about recently about people who wanted to redo their bathroom and they were getting all fussy about it in the contractors, and so it's like, yeah, desire in conflict, baby, their old.

Desire and jealousy, Venus, one of the shadows of Venus is jealousy. I want what she or he has, is in possession of, looks like so, and then what we desire is connected to a kind of comparison and a competitiveness, Venus and Mars, the competition, the rivalry, the jealousy, the desire, the beauty, something really beautiful about other people and seeing what they have, and holding that as an image up to ourselves and saying, I want to be that there's nothing wrong with that necessarily, but look at how far and crazy it can get, you know, people get possessed by it and when I say that we can lose our sense of humor. What I mean is not that it's a particularly good look to go around being a jealous comparative person who can't be happy with who they are and wants what other people have. Like, that's not a great look.

But at the same time, it's like, it's so basic, and it's there's so many beautiful that like if I told you the truth, like, there are many astrologers that set out an example to me, like, I want to be like that, you know, and appreciation is very close to jealousy at times for us, sometimes we just were teetering on an edge that we think is so morally perfectly clear, and I would never be jealous, I just appreciate really the truth. It's like, I don't know. So anyway, the point is, we can have good senses of humor, if we recognize the propensity to be jealous of and enter into entangled conflict with that, which we will also appreciate.

So that's Venus and Mars, desire in cooperation. You know, one of the beautiful things that can come about from Venus and Mars is saying, There's something I want, but I have to cooperate; I have to cooperate. To get there, you have to enter into meaningful social engagements to get where you want to go and Venus, in this case, being a little bit more dominant, maybe that's one of the benefits in the sky.

Right now, we're going to talk about galaxy brain stuff a little later in the week. But, like, Venus being more strongly configured by dignities in the sky could certainly mean that we're more willing to cooperate with clashes of value or with desires and the kind of assertive willful drive of Mars to go toward what it wants, what it wants to win or accomplish. It might be more influenced by the cooperative forces of Venus. Remember, their child is Harmonia is beautiful.

Harmonia is also a word that was used by ancient Greeks philosophically to describe what they believe the nature of the cosmos was. There's actually a marriage of all of these different forces that collectively express the togetherness, the intelligibleness, and the beauty and truthfulness of the universe, which includes archetypes that are very difficult, like Pluto, you know, or Mars or Saturn.

They're a part of reality, and it's like the only way that we can start to see that and make peace with it, make peace with it, meaning that we allow for it, not that we don't try to control it and we don't compound our frustration or challenges with those archetypes by thinking that they have no place. We come to understand the mysteriousness of the universe and the just sonus of all of the difficult archetypes, so they're part of it, and then we start to feel this deeper harmony. The mysterious you can't circumscribe it with your mind. You know, you can't.

You can't look around and explain rationally why every bad thing happens to every good person or why cruelty or darkness or terror exist. But you, you start, there starts to be a felt sense that nothing is really out of place. You can't do that you can't get there. Unless you do the brave and, I think, very humorous work of looking at the marriage of these different archetypes within ourselves. Not in big, you don't have to be a supervillain to identify the shadows in yourself.

Certainly any of us can identify these things. Yeah, I get jealous. Yes, what I want leads me into conflicts that are actually really contrary to the kind of peace or happiness that I guess I'm wanting out of all of this, you know what I mean? And it's not that, that, that we don't come to logical conclusions about experience in life activity as a matter of shutting them down.

We come to these archetypal understandings so that we can go on living, but we can do so with a bit of that hermetic understanding that that slippery, ironic, paradoxical, back-and-forth newness of life and entered, you know, the interdependency of archetypes that places Mercury Hermes in the bed of the image, as Hillman said, you know, so that's our goal, astrology was called The Science of Hermes.

So desire and cooperation, we can desire things and then realize, well, I'm going to have to have a war council and a peace treaty in order to get things done, and that's a part of War Two; it always has been.

Number four is desire and compromise, very similar to saying, well, I can't have all that I want, but I can have some of what I want; there's got to be a give and take. Maybe again, the potential this week is a little bit more for these nicer sounding feeling, expressions because of Venus's dominance.

Staying aware of not only what we want but why we want it in the shadows of why we want it like a really good exercise to do is when you really want something, you're feeling very solid about doing it right out on a piece of paper. Why do I want it? Then write out another little column, you know, that says what are the shadows of why I wanted it. Maybe in the first column, you write all the things that you feel are very good and virtuous or beautiful about what you want, and then in the other column, just write down like, what are the shadows, be really honest, have fun with it, don't feel guilty, just own it.

You know, we can be an experience and hold space for so many things at once. That's what's so beautiful about this, and that's where interesting writing comes from; interesting art comes from interesting expressions of music.

If you think about someone who's playing a piece of improvisational jazz music or something. So many times I've heard this said that a wrong note is only a wrong note if it isn't followed by the right thing, and so, you know, identifying shadows within what we desire, we get so puritanical and rigid about that kind of exercise, oh, no, I'm pure, there's nothing wrong here. Because what we're thinking is that things are actually black and white, and if I don't, you know, stay in my mind or in my presentation, as though I am only and always on the right side of things, then, you know, there's going to be something wrong with me or there'll be a penalty, or you got to trust that a universe that is as nuanced and beautiful and sophisticated and paradoxical looks at you, in the same way that it understands itself. You know, you have to trust that, and you have to be willing to say, you know, Mars and Venus are both alive and well in me, and look at those shadows. When you look at the shadows, it doesn't make you more or less bad or good.

It makes you whole, and then you can move with more sophistication. It's as, though, when we're willing to look at the shadows of why we want what we want with Venus and Mars conjoining, that Hermes honors us and says, I love that I love that you're going back and forth. I love that you're not trying to be a binary, you know, like a kind of polarized situation; you're creating your head; I love that you're not going there. I love that you are moving freely and exploring nuances and complicated relationships between archetypes and themes, and when Hermes notices us doing that, it is as though Hermes becomes more active in guiding us moment to moment with these complicated relationships and helping us feel our way through.

They're the paradoxes because there's guidance in that there's guidance in this kind of honesty, you're honest with yourself about have these shadows then, and you have a good sense of humor about it and a curiosity, and I mean, you're right there, it's you're allowing that is Hermes coming forth. That attitude is the attitude that the psychopomp boasts the guide of souls Hermes takes, that's the patron of our science and astrology.

So anyway, that's my rant for today. I hope that this was useful for you guys. I hope you'll enjoy the conjunction of Venus and Mars, as we can notice it in all these different ways. Hilda is very anxious to go out because Ashley just got home and shes downstairs, so she's so excited. So excited. I hope you guys have a great day today, and we'll see you again tomorrow.